Identifying Family History and Substance Use Associations for Adult Epilepsy from the Electronic Health Record

Epilepsy is a prevalent chronic neurological disorder afflicting about 50 million people worldwide. There is evidence of a strong relationship between familial risk factors and epilepsy, as well as associations with substance use. The goal of this study was to explore the interactions between familial risk factors and substance use based on structured data from the family and social history modules of an electronic health record system for adult epilepsy patients. A total of 8,957patients with 38,802 family history entries and 8,822 substance use entries were gathered and mined for associations at different levels of granularity for three age groupings (>18, 18-64, and ≥65 years old). Our results demonstrate the value of an association rule mining approach to validate knowledge of familial risk factors. The preliminary findings also suggest that substance use does not demonstrate significant association between social and familial risk factors for epilepsy.