EPI-SCOT is a new research study into epilepsy.
All children and young people who have been diagnosed with epilepsy in Scotland after 1st March 2025 are invited to participate.

The EPI-SCOT study aims to understand how knowing the cause of a young person's epilepsy might help us chose the most effective treatments and offer the best support.

Epilepsy is a condition in which people have bursts of extra electrical activity in the brain, leading to epileptic seizures. Epilepsy can start at any age, but most often starts either in childhood, or in people over 60 years.

Epilepsy is probably more common than you think. One in 100 people is diagnosed with epilepsy during childhood. In an average high school, there will be 10 young people with epilepsy.

Children with epilepsy are more likely to have difficulties with learning, behaviour and mood. The treatments for epilepsy try to reduce epileptic seizures. We don’t have a very good idea what these treatments do for other difficulties that people with epilepsy might have. 

Doctors and other medical professionals are getting better at finding causes for epilepsy. We now know that our genes are the most important thing that determines whether someone has epilepsy. Sometimes we can find a specific change in a gene that explains why a person has epilepsy.

In the EPI-SCOT study, we hope to understand more about why epilepsy is harder to control in some children than others. We want to know why some children have additional difficulties whilst others do not. We also want to see which treatments for epilepsy are being used, and which seem to be helping people the most. Once we’ve looked at all our data, in future doctors might be able to choose the best treatments earlier. To get the answers to these questions we need to gather information about lots of children with epilepsy.

So, we want all children and young people with epilepsy in Scotland to join our study!