Beliefs and behaviors of patients' relatives towards childhood epilepsy in Turkey

Abstract

Background/aim: Beliefs about health-related problems throughout history are conveyed differently. Unsafe practices based on the superstitious beliefs of patients' relatives in situations requiring emergency medical attention, such as childhood epilepsy, or in the treatment of chronic diseases may be harmful to children's health. Our study aims to determine the superstitious beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours of the relatives of children with epilepsy.

Methods: A total of 252 relatives of patients diagnosed with childhood epilepsy were included in this cross-sectional study conducted between 15 September and 15 October 2019. The data collection form contained questions about the sociodemographic information of the participants and their beliefs and behaviours towards the disease. The frequency (percentage) and mean were used to summarise the data obtained through the application of the questionnaire, and Student's t-test and correlation methods were used for group comparisons; p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results: In the study, 77.0% of the participants were women, 77.4% were mothers, 43.3% were primary school graduates, 71.8% were unemployed, 77.7% had a low income, 52% lived within a distance of less than 1 km, and 157 of them used folk medicine. There was no relationship between education, income, distance from health institutions, occupation, use of traditional methods, and superstitions. A relationship was found between the relatives of patients with resistant epilepsy who stated that the cause of the disease was superstition (p = 0.036). There was also a correlation between the use of traditional methods (p = 0.006), presence of resistant epilepsy, indication of the cause of the disease as superstition (p = 0.004), and use of traditional methods (p = 0.005).

Conclusion: Our study shows that approximately four-fifths of the participants had superstitious beliefs about epilepsy and exhibited attitudes and behaviours suggestive of neglect that are unsafe for children. Whilst the individual characteristics of the participants did not affect negative attitudes and behaviours, the presence of resistant epilepsy in their children increased the negative attitude tendency.

Keywords: Beliefs; Epilepsy; Folk medicine; Paediatric patient.