Familial History and Recurrence of Febrile Seizures; a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objective: febrile seizure (fs) as the most common form of seizures in childhood, affects 2-5% of all children across the world. the present study reviews available reports on fs recurrence frequency and evaluates its associated risk factors in iran. methods: we searched the persian database such as: sid, magiran, medlip, irandoc, iranmedex as well as english databases pubmed, isi, and scopus. random effects models were used to calculate 95% confidence intervals. meta regression was introduced to explore the heterogeneity between studies. findings: the overall fs recurrence rate was 20.9% [95% confidence interval (ci): 12.3-29.5%]. the frequency of fs simple and complex types was 69.3% (95% ci: 59.5-79.0) and 25.3% (95% ci: 19.6 -31.0), respectively. a positive familial history of 28.8% (95% ci: 19.3-38.4%) was observed for childhood fs including 36.2% (95% ci: 27.3-39.6%) for the simple and 29.4% (95% ci: 23.1-33.5%) for the complex type. the heterogeneity of recurrent fs was significantly affected by sample size (p=0.026). conclusion: almost one-third of fs children had a positive familial history. the increased risk of recurrence in patients with symptomatic seizures needs to be fully considered by parents, physicians, nurses and health policy makers.