학술논문

Review: Comparing drug treatments in epilepsy
Document Type
article
Source
Therapeutic Advances in Neurological Disorders, Vol 2 (2009)
Subject
Neurology. Diseases of the nervous system
RC346-429
Language
English
ISSN
1756-2856
17562856
Abstract
The great majority of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that compare antiepileptic drugs are industry sponsored and have the objective of obtaining a monotherapy license for a drug. Such trials do not inform everyday clinical practice as they tend to be too short and to depart from clinical practice by restricting clinicians in their choice of actions. The data that exists provides evidence that drugs with actions on voltage-gated sodium channels provide best seizure control for localised onset seizures and epilepsy syndromes, while valproate provides best seizure control for generalised epilepsy and unclassified syndromes. Drugs do, however, vary in their tolerability over the short term and in their risk for rare serious idiosyncratic adverse events, chronic toxicity and teratogenicity; issues that cannot be examined within the scope of RCTs.