• Fenta Haile Mekonnen, Workie Demeke Lakew, Zike Dereje Tesfaye, and Prafulla Kumar Swain.
• Department of Statistics, College of Science, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar- Ethiopia.
• Afr Health Sci. 2019 Sep 1; 19 (3): 2555-2564.

BackgroundChronic non-communicable diseases:- such as epilepsy, are increasingly recognized as public health problems in developing and African countries. This study aimed at finding determinants of the number of epileptic seizure attacks using different count data modeling techniques.MethodsFour common fixed-effects Poisson family models were reviewed to analyze the count data with a high proportion of zeros in longitudinal outcome, i.e., the number of seizure attacks in epilepsy patients. This is because, in addition to the problem of extra zeros, the correlation between measurements upon the same patient at different occasions needs to be taken into consideration.ResultsThe investigation remarkably identified some important factors associated with epileptic seizure attacks. As people grow old, the number of seizure attacks increased and male patients had more seizures than their female counterparts. In general, a patient's age, sex, monthly income, family history of epilepsy andservice satisfaction were some of the significant factors responsible for the frequency of seizure attacks (P value<0.05).ConclusionThis study suggests that zero-inflated negative binomial is the best model for predicting and describing the number of seizure attacks as well as identifying the potential risk factors. Addressing these risk factors will definitely contain the progression of seizure attack.© 2019 Mekonnen et al.

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