Mood and Anxiety Disorders and Suicidality in Patients With Newly Diagnosed Focal Epilepsy

In the Research Article “Mood and Anxiety Disorders and Suicidality in Patients With Newly Diagnosed Focal Epilepsy: An Analysis of a Complex Comorbidity” by Kanner et al.,¹ there was an error in the coding of hypomanic and manic episodes. This error resulted in an inflated number of patients with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (n = 24), which dropped to n = 14, and a higher number of patients with only hypomania (n = 23), which dropped to n = 11, after the data were corrected. In addition, in some of these patients, their diagnosis was changed to major depressive disorder. This error also resulted in a higher number of patients with mood disorders (n = 82 [23.6%]), which dropped to n = 65 (17.7% of the entire cohort) when corrected.

On further review of all the MINI-derived data and identified errors in the diagnosis of anxiety disorders in 7 patients, errors resulted in a decrease in the number of patients with an anxiety disorder from n = 95 (27.4%) to n = 88 (25.4%). In addition, there were errors in the type of major depressive disorders (with vs without melancholia). The total number of patients with mood and/or anxiety disorders and/or suicidality was n = 151 (43.5% of the entire cohort), and after the corrections were made, it dropped to n = 133 (38% of the entire cohort).

Despite the lower number of patients with a mood and/or anxiety disorder, there was no change in the results of the logistic regression analyses that identified the types of mood and anxiety disorders predicting the different forms of suicidality, with 2 minor exceptions (major depression now becoming statistically significant in predicting “any type of suicidality” and panic disorder not predicting “suicidal attempts”). Despite the lower number of patients with bipolar disorder in the corrected version, the prevalence of this disorder continued to be higher in the cohort than in the general population, and this was also true for the different types of anxiety disorder.

Both the full and short-form versions of the article have been replaced with corrected versions. The original versions with the changes highlighted are available online with the corrected full article. The authors regret the errors.