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Objective: Coping attitudes play an important role in ensuring compliance with the person challenging with life situations. Resistance to the event or factors that cause stress on individual and showing cognitive, emotional and behavioral reactions to withstand all these conditions are defined as coping attitudes. Whereas syncope can be a symptom of epileptic seizure; it may be a form of self defense mechanism or coping attitude. The differential diagnosis of the two is often difficult. In this study, we aimed to investigate coping attitudes of patients with epileptic or nonepileptic seizures.
Methods: This study was made in Gulhane Medical Faculty, Neurology Outpatient Clinic, in Turkey. We aimed to compare coping attitudes of a control group (n=98) with those of study groups with epilepsy history, which were enrolled and sub-classified as nonepileptic (n=147) and epileptic (n=112) patients. Participants’ socio-demographic (age, gender, education level, marital status) and clinical characteristics were recorded by using a data collection form. COPE Inventory was applied to measure for coping attitudes. ANOVA test was used to compare groups in terms of age, education levels and COPE score. Also Turkey test was used for Post hoc analysis. Sex, smoking and marital status was compared with chi-square test. P value under or equal to 0.05 was accepted as significant.
Results: There was a statistically significant difference between three groups in terms of total scores of dysfunctional coping attitudes (p<0.05). Religious coping subscale scores were higher than emotion focused coping attitudes, problem focused coping attitudes were lower than joke pounding subscale scores and other occupations suppression subscale scores were higher in epileptic and nonepileptic patients.
Discussion: This study showed that patients with epileptic and non epileptic syncope (nonepileptic more) used dysfunctional coping attitudes more than control group. These patients used functional coping strategies less often whereas they mostly applied religious focused coping attitudes, which is subset of the emotional focused attitudes.