Abstracts Health Sciences

Disparities and Inequities in Health, Health Care, and Outcomes for People Living with Epilepsy

by Wyatt Peter Bensken

Disparities and inequities in health, health care, and outcomes are driven by a myriad of factors and can occur at various points in a patient’s experience. Generally, it is the confluence of structural, health care, socio-cultural, and physiological factors that contribute to variations that present as both disparities and inequities. Patterns of these variations can be examined in a disease-specific context, such as among people living with epilepsy. Epilepsy is a neurological disease characterized by the occurrence of unprovoked seizures. There is a wide range of types of seizures and epilepsy, and onset can occur at any point in life. Being diagnosed with epilepsy, and the subsequent management of seizures, may involve trials of anti-seizure drugs, visits to both primary care physicians as well as neurologists and epileptologists. Given this complexity, epilepsy provides an important condition in which we can assess and understand disparities and inequities.This dissertation examines the health, health care, and outcomes for people living with epilepsy with a particular focus on identifying potential disparities and inequities in these areas. Starting with an equity conceptual framework, I use a combination of traditional statistical as well as machine learning techniques in the context of: Medicaid enrollment, co-occurring conditions, treatment, health outcomes, and finally an analysis that evaluates the inclusion criteria used. Taken together, this work identifies the wide-ranging and multifactorial areas of disparities and inequities for people living with epilepsy.