Author's response to reviews Title: Health-related quality of life in epilepsy adults: the effect of age-related factors in a multicentric Italian study Authors:

and methods. Q6. The patients were “recruited” but no indication is given of how they were “recruited”. This implies that the group might have been a highly-selected, biased population, with little or no relevance to the general population of the people with epilepsy. A6. The paper already specified that patients were recruited consecutively from secondary and tertiary Italian centers for the care of epilepsy. However, it referred to a previous publication (reference 34) for details on the clinical characteristics of the sample. In order to clarify that the sample was representative of the population of adults with epilepy followed in those centers (and to reply to a point by Reviewer 1), we added the following sentence in the Results section: “Briefly, patients had a median age of 36 years, a median epilepsy duration of 16 years, and a median age at onset of seizures of 16 years (see also Table 2 (Additional file 2)). Almost 40% of patients had no seizures in preceding 12 months, 25.5% had from 1 to 5 seizures, 13% from 6 to 20, and 21.7% had more than 20 seizures. Most of the patients had focal (74.3%) or generalized (22.2%) epilepsy, were in remission since more than a year (53.4%) or showed non-drug-resistant seizures (20.3%), and were in monotherapy (54.1%) or polytherapy (44.3%).” Except for the low proportion of cases with newly diagnosed epilepsy and the high proportion of patients receiving polytherapy, the main clinical characteristics of the sample do not differ significantly from those seen in population-based samples. We also managed to enroll consecutive cases among those seen in the centers’ outpatient services. Moreover, in the discussion section, we also reported how our analysis would have changed if a subsample of adult patients with medication-resistant epilepsy were considered. Q7. Epilepsy is not a disease, it is a disorder which may result from a number of different identifiable diseases or from no identifiable disease. A7. We changed the term “disease” with “disorder” throughout the text.