Oxford University researchers have found people with epilepsy are 10 times more likely to die before their mid-50s, compared with the general population.
The study, which was also carried out by the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, studied health data for almost 70,000 people with epilepsy born between 1954 and 2009.
Researchers compared mortality data for these patients with more than 660,000 people from the general population, matched by age and gender.
This study showed 8.8 per cent of people with epilepsy died – compared with 0.7 per cent of people from the general population.
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