Children with epilepsy and their families face the stress of unpredictable seizures, frequent cognitive, psychiatric, and behavioral comorbidities, and the challenges of treatment. Anxiety and depression are known to reduce the effectiveness of antiepileptic drugs and surgery, making it important to address stress and coping in children with epilepsy and their families.
Research on older children and adults with chronic illnesses suggests that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) can improve quality of life and reduce stress.
Tassiopoulos et al [Pediatrics Open Science] conducted a randomized, controlled pilot study of an MBI to evaluate its efficacy on quality of life for young children with epilepsy.
The researchers enrolled 72 Canadian parents (94% female) and their 4-10 year-old children (average age = 8 years; 58% male). Families having a child with epilepsy were randomly assigned to an MBI called Making Mindfulness Matter or a waitlist control.
Making Mindfulness Matter was delivered online in eight weekly synchronous group sessions: 1.5 hours for parents (focused on mindful parenting) and separate 1-hour session for children (focusing on age-appropriate mindfulness skills). Topics included the stress response, mindful awareness of breathing, thinking, sensing, and movement, responding rather than reacting, perspective-taking, and cultivating optimism, gratitude, and kindness.
Children were assigned either a 4-6 year-old group or a 6-10 year-old to ensure age appropriateness of content. All children continued to receive standard pediatric neurological care.
The primary outcome was parent-reported total scores on the 55-item Quality of Life in Childhood Epilepsy (QOLCE) questionnaire. Secondary outcomes included cognitive, emotional, social, and physical QOLCE subscale scores. A 10-point improvement on the QOLCE total score was defined as a minimal clinically important difference. Parents completed the QOLCE at baseline and one week post-treatment; intervention group parents also completed it at a 10-week follow-up.
Results showed no significant group differences in QOLCE total scores at baseline. At post-treatment, the MBI group of children had an average 7-point higher QOLCE total score than the control group (d=0.40). Clinically important improvement was observed in 28% of children in the MBI group compared with 3% of controls. Subscale analyses showed advantages for the MBI group at post-treatment of 12 points in cognitive functioning, 6 points in emotional functioning, and 5 points in social functioning.
The average post-treatment total QOLCE score for the MBI group of children was 5 points higher than their baseline, and at 10-week follow-up, that difference had declined to 4 points higher, suggesting some fading of benefit over time.
The pilot findings initially suggest that Making Mindfulness Matter may offer moderate short-term benefits to young children with epilepsy by improving overall quality of life. Benefits appeared to diminish at ten weeks.
Study limitations include the lack of child-reported or objective outcome measures, the absence of an active time-matched control, and a sample size that was smaller than planned due to recruitment challenges. Further, there was no follow-up in the control group.
Reference:
Tassiopoulos, K. N., Puka, K., Bax, K., Secco, M., Andrade, A., DeVries-Rizzo, M., Franklin, M., Gangam, H., Levin, S., Nouri, M. N., Prasad, A. N., Spinelli, E., Zou, G., Vingilis, E., & Nixon Speechley, K. (2025). Making Mindfulness Matter© May Improve Quality of Life in Young Children With Epilepsy: Pilot RCT. Pediatrics Open Science.
Link to study
