Background Epilepsy is a brain disorder affecting nearly 65 million people worldwide. It is characterized by sudden, transient, and uncontrolled episodes of brain dysfunction secondary to hypersynchronous abnormal discharge of cortical neuronal cells resulting in motor, sensory, and behavioral manifestations. Cognitive deterioration can occur in approximately 70–80% of epileptic patients with a variety of epilepsy-related characteristics being implicated. This study aimed to assess cognitive functions in a sample of patients with generalized tonic–clonic epilepsy and determine its relation to different epilepsy-related characteristics. It was designed as a case–control cross-sectional study in which 106 participants were enrolled and divided into two groups: a case group of fifty-three patients diagnosed with generalized tonic–clonic epilepsy and a control group including fifty-three healthy subjects. Sociodemographic and epilepsy-related characteristics and a variety of cognitive functions were assessed for both groups. Results Epileptic patients were significantly suffering from impairment in attention, memory, visuospatial (P = 0.001), and language functions (P = 0.018) compared to the healthy control group. Conclusions Epileptic patients are significantly suffering from cognitive impairment with a variety of contributing epilepsy-related characteristics.

Potassium diformate has demonstrated effectiveness in enhancing growth performance of terrestrial animals and improves the general health status of cultured animals by its stronger antimicrobial effect. Consequently, this study was conducted to determine the effects of dietary organic acid salts as (potassium diformate) on growth promoters for monosex Nile tilapia fingerlings. Four experimental diets with three different inclusion levels of potassium diformate (KDF) (0.1, 0.3 and 0.5%) besides the control diet containing no KDF. A total of 120 tilapia, weighing approximately 5±0.5 g, were divided equally between 4 different treatments with 3 replicates (10 fish / replicate). Fish were fed two times a day at rate 3% of body weight on a pelletized isonitrogenous diet containing 25% crude protein and isocaloric (gross energy 393 Kcal/100g). The results indicated that the addition of 0.3% KDF had a significantly higher growth performance, feed conversion ratio, feed efficiency, feed intake and survival of monosex tilapia fingerlings, compared to the control group. In conclusion, these results revealed that using 0.3% KDF was the best in terms of growth performance and economic analysis under this experimental condition.