Researchers at NYU Langone Health found that 63% of patients receiving a commonly prescribed focal epilepsy treatment, levetiracetam, continued to experience seizure symptoms for a year on average until they received the correct dosage of drugs — or in some cases, until they tried a different kind of treatment altogether. 

The study was conducted as part of the Human Epilepsy Project, an international team spanning 28 hospitals that studies new-onset focal epilepsy — where waves of electrical signals are released from a selected region of the brain, causing uncontrolled activity such as abnormal emotions or unusual behaviors.

Neurologists often start patients on levetiracetam, an oral formulation to treat focal epilepsy. But in the study, only a quarter of the 57% of participants on levetiracetam became seizure-free immediately after starting the medication. Some patients who had experienced fewer seizure episodes became treatment resistant.”

The eight year study started in 2018 and was composed of around 450 female and male patients with a median age of 32. Research honed in on medical centers across the United States, Europe and Australia, collecting medical history and demographic information like race, seizure frequency and previous treatment.

“There have been several studies on focal epilepsy,” Jacqueline French, an epileptologist at NYU Langone Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, wrote in a statement to WSN. “Ours was unique in that we obtained more in depth data on each subject, including MRI and blood for biomarker analysis.”

In the observational, long-term study, patients’ lives and other variables were largely unmanipulated by the researchers, who instead collected data by giving participants diaries to track the frequency of their seizures on a daily basis. As the work was ongoing, the research team continued looking into new ways to relieve seizure patients of seizures and examined different types of medicine and dosages. 

The team found that in several cases, the problem was not the dosage of medication but rather the screening of patients for the correct kind of antiseizure treatment when admitting them.

Contact Vincent Pena at [email protected].