INTRODUCTION: Several psychiatric comorbidities linked to epilepsy are prevalent, and they can reduce the people with epilepsy (PE) health-related quality of life (HRQOL). OBJECTIVES: To approach the magnitude of the psychiatric comorbidities, their distribution, according to the distribution by age and gender. To recognize: the risk factors for them, and their classification/diagnosis; the indexes of multimorbididity of potential use in epileptology, and their applicability in HRQOL; repercussion in the clinical practice of the approach of the mentioned comorbidities. METHODS: Narrative revision on psychiatric comorbidities, mainly based on population based studies published in the last 10 years. RESULTS: The psychiatric disorders are more prevalent in the PE than in the general population, being the humor disorder, anxiety, psychoses, schizophrenia, personality disorder, and alcoholic dependence the most common. Several of them are more prevalent in any age group of the PE than in the general population, and more in the women than in the men, and they tend to echo negatively in their socioeconomic level. The diagnosis of these comorbidities is limited: it is not common the distinction between general psychiatric disorders and those related to the epilepsy. CONCLUSIONS: The psychiatric disorders are common in the PE, mainly of humor, but the rates are diversified as well as the used methodologies, and there is need of better approach of them to the patients' better clinical control, improvement of their HRQOL and reduction of health care costs.
Epilepsy; comorbidity; psychopathology; health-related quality of life; multimorbidity index
