Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people aged between 18 and 25 have epilepsy.

This information is not held in the format requested. However, the following table shows a count of finished admission episodes (FAEs) and distinct patients where there is a primary diagnosis, or any diagnosis, of epilepsy, where the patient was aged 18 to 25 years old on admission, in 2024/25, in English National Health Service hospitals:

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics, NHS England

Notes:

1. an FAE is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. FAEs are counted against the year or month in which the admission episode finishes.  Admissions do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the period;
2. patient counts are based on the unique patient identifier. This identifier is derived from a patient’s date of birth, postcode, sex, local patient identifier, and NHS number, using a standard algorithm. Where data are incomplete, this identifier may wrongly link episodes or fail to recognise episodes for the same patient;
3. the primary diagnosis is the first of up to 20 diagnosis fields in the HES data set and provides the main reason why the patient was admitted to hospital;
4. the number of episodes where this diagnosis was recorded in any of the 20 primary and secondary diagnosis fields in a HES record. Each episode is only counted once, even if a relevant diagnosis is recorded in more than one diagnosis field of the record; and
5. for the purposes of these data the following ICD-10 codes have been used: G40 - Epilepsy G41 - Status epilepticus.

Please be aware that this data does not represent the total number of people aged between 18 and 25 years old who have a diagnosis of epilepsy. This data only represents the number of patients aged between 18 and 25 years old with epilepsy who required hospital admission in 2024/25. The data presented here will, therefore, only represent a small proportion of the total number of people aged between 18 and 25 years old who have a diagnosis of epilepsy.