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Latest Research Medications

June 21, 2019

There is a lot of research going on in epilepsy, constantly looking for better treatments. It’s kind of interesting and one of the frustrating sort of realities that we’ve dealt with, which is that over the last 20 to 30 years, we’ve had an explosion on number of medications. And I point out that, you know, a drug we use today, was Dilantin, was a drug that we really discovered in the 1930s and was the most commonly prescribed drug until relatively recently. And because, you know, of the boom in medications, we’ve had you know, again, over 20 different anticonvulsants on the market. But one of the frustrating things that we’ve seen is that with all of these new medications, we haven’t seen a reduction in how frequently we control someone’s epilepsy. And so the number of about roughly give or take 60, 65% of patients respond to medications and 30 to 35% continue to have seizures. That hasn’t changed in the last 30 years. So all of these things that we’ve done haven’t had quite the effect on controlling epilepsy that we want. So with respect to research, there are a few things going on. First and foremost, new medications in the pipelines, medications using novel or new mechanisms of action, ideally maybe with more effectiveness, less side effects, and so there are definitely new medications being developed from that end.

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