Febrile seizures are commonly presented as benign convulsions among the pediatric population. The condition is highly intimidating to the children’s family [1]. The current qualitative study took place to investigate this notion.
Eighty-seven (10.9%) of the study population showed only one FC child. Prevalence of the initial attack among their children was (29.9%). In a similar study, the FC prevalence was reported as 37% in the same pediatric age group [12].
On the other hand, a report from a different geographical area stated a higher percentage (50%) of toddlers with FC [15].
In the current study, 52 (59.8%) of children were girls. Among them, about 37% have repeated FC attacks. This data contradicts other literature that express a higher incidence of FC among boys compared to girls [1, 12, 15,16,17].
Parents' ages at our study ranged from 18 to 60 years. Majority of them were university graduates. This partially coincides with a similar publication that showed an age range from 15 to 50 years, yet, more than 50% of the participants attained primary education [15]. In contrast, others reported 100% of mothers have no formal education [14].
It was reported that variations in educational level are the main pivot for the different parental FC perception [12, 17, 18]. In contrast, most of our study population was university graduates; yet, they showed limited knowledge and information about the FC problem.
Parents were highly concerned about FC complications. A quite respected percentage (41.4%) of them had the concept that FC may lead to irreversible brain damage and developmental retardation. Others (40.2%) had the notion that continuous fever, epilepsy, and death may be the result of FC. These data are relatively comparable to previous similarly published literature [1, 15, 19]. The different concepts might be explained by the differences in educational and social background.
Many reported a high FC recurrence rate among children who had their initial seizures below the age of 15 months [7, 9, 19]. Children with precures suffering of epilepsy have a higher susceptibility rate to have the complex type of FC-related seizures [7, 20].
Such complex FC are also highly presented among children with neurodevelopmental growth retardation [7, 18]. Overall, FC are generally considered a self-limited pathology with a good prognosis among the pediatric population. The recurrence rate is about (4%) [7].
We reported 52.9% of participants believing that FC is a life-threatening condition. They also thought that it may cause brain damage with a strong affection of their future mental and intellectual development. These conceptual ideas are supported by previously published reports [7, 9, 12, 18]. This may be attributed to parental fear and anxiety during the attack [1, 12, 14].
Contradicting other studies, 77% of our participants did not believe in herbal medicine as a treatment tool for FC [15, 17, 19, 21]. Interestingly, the majority of our subjects (94.3%) did not consider FC as a shameful condition, compared to others who reported more than 50% of participants believing FC is a stigmatic event [22].
A considerable percentage (40.2%) of the study population were convinced that FC are not a type of epilepsy and needs not any antiepileptic therapy. Others denoted 73% of the population considering FC as an epilepsy that requires pharmacological therapy [15]. The reason is related to the disparity of educational level that may have influenced their overall perception about the problem [12, 13, 15, 17, 21].
