Avaliação de crenças sobre epilepsia em adultos e crianças em grupos de universitários

Abstract

The epilepsy is the world´s most common serious neurological disorder, affecting some 50 million individuals worlwide. Perhaps more than any other disorder, is associated with profound deletirous psychological and sociological consequences thar are not directly related to the real disease process. The population´s misconceptions about epilepsy and the it´s negative stereotypes still persist, and the people with epilepsy is still suffering from the lack of technical information, and from negative beliefs of people. Therefore, this work had the purpose of rising the beliefs about epileptic adults and children through a sample of 186 university students shared in 3 area/group of knowledge biomedical, exacts and human sciences. The data were colected using an adaptaded instrument from the Epilepsy Beliefs and Attitudes Scale, with itens about medical and non-medical beliefs. The data were compiled in the SPSS version 10, and the main analises were done by Kruskal Wallis test. The results indicated no significative differences among the groups (biomedical, excts and human sciences), but revealed differences in the judgement of affirmatives related to medical and nomedical beliefs, pointing that all the groups differ the kind of the beliefs, but don´t judge them differently because of their academic background, even with the beliefs about adults so as those about epileptic children. The main conclusions of this study were that universitary sample holds its evaluation based more on the tacit knowledge than the tecnic one about epilepsy. The beliefs related to children with epilepsy, comparatively to those related to epileptic adults, seem to be less based on tecnic informations about this neurological desorder. This study shows the importance and the necessity of more researchs that investigue deeply the social and psychological impact of epilepsy to promove cientific support for the development of new public educational programs for the population at all.