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The role of companions in outpatient seizure clinic interactions - a pilot study 12.08.15 PDrev.pdf (310.08 kB)

The role of companions in outpatient seizure clinic interactions: a pilot study

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-11-03, 16:47 authored by Catherine Robson, Paul Drew, Markus Reuber
Purpose This study explored contributions that patients' companions (seizure witnesses) make to interactions in the seizure clinic and whether the nature of the companions' interactional contributions can help with the differentiation of epilepsy and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES). Methods Conversation analysis methods were used to examine video recordings and transcripts of neurologists' interactions with patients referred to a specialist seizure clinic and their companions. Results The companions' behavior correlated with interactional features previously observed to distinguish patients with epilepsy from patients with PNES. Patients with PNES, but not those with epilepsy, tended to exhibit interactional resistance to the doctor's efforts to find out more about their seizure experiences and, thereby, encouraged greater interactional contribution from companions. Conclusion The contributions that companions make (in part, prompted by patient's interactional behavior) may provide additional diagnostic pointers in this clinical setting, and a number of candidate features that may help clinicians distinguish between epilepsy and PNES when the patient is accompanied by a seizure witness are described. However, companion contributions may limit the doctor's ability to identify linguistic and interactional features with previously demonstrated diagnostic potential in the conversational contributions made by patients themselves. To help offset potential diagnostic losses, doctors may need to explicitly discuss the role of the companion in the consultation when a seizure witness (or another companion) accompanies the patient.

Funding

This article presents independent research funded by Epilepsy Action (REF:10/H1308/9).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Epilepsy & Behaviour

Citation

ROBSON, C., DREW, P. and REUBER, M., 2016. The role of companions in outpatient seizure clinic interactions: a pilot study. Epilepsy & Behavior, 60, pp. 86-93.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-04-02

Publication date

2016

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Epilepsy & Behavior and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2016.04.010.

ISSN

1525-5050

Language

  • en