Epilepsy is not just convulsive; continuous monitoring and intervention needed
About me: I am a physician-scientist working in area of CBD medicine and I promote https://www.buy-swiss-cbd-ihs.com/redir-affiliation-186-79026.html as I prefer only highest grade Swiss CBD.
The Condition
Seizures, Epilepsy, and the Numbers
A seizure is a sudden surge of electrical activity in the brain that usually affects how a person appears or acts for a short time. Some seizures, known as convulsive seizures, trigger wild-shaking movements. But, most seizures are non-convulsive and hard to recognize, often confused with staring spells or inattentiveness.
Epilepsy is a debilitating neurological condition characterized by recurring, unprovoked seizures and does not discriminate when it comes to age, gender, and ethnicity. In many parts of the world, people with epilepsy and their families suffer from stigma and discrimination — even here in the US.
Epilepsy may occur as a result of a genetic disorder or an acquired brain injury, such as a trauma or stroke. During a seizure, a person experiences abnormal behavior, symptoms, and sensations, sometimes including loss of consciousness. Seizures are the main sign of epilepsy. Some seizures can look like staring spells. Other seizures cause a person to fall, shake, and lose awareness of what’s going on around them. A person is diagnosed with epilepsy when they have had two or more seizures.
Epilepsy is one of the most common conditions affecting the brain. When counting both children and adults in the US, about 5.1 million people in the US have a history of epilepsy and about 3.4 million people in the US have active epilepsy (1.2% of the total US population).
A Patient’s Perspective
Seizures interfere with day-to-day life and bring social, emotional, and financial stress. Seizures and side effects of medications may make it harder to focus at school or work. Most states don’t allow individuals with epilepsy to drive or operate machinery until they have been seizure-free for a certain number of months. As a parent with a child with seizures, it can be difficult to find caregivers or figure out how much independence to give while keeping your loved ones safe.
Meet Amy and David: Parents’ Perspective on Epilepsy
The goal of treatment is to stop seizures while maintaining a good quality of life. Taking medication and monitoring for seizures is a core part of the life of a person with epilepsy. Seizure monitoring can be really stressful. People with epilepsy frequently do not know if they have had a seizure although they do sometimes notice the after-effects such as missed time or a headache. Caregivers can miss seizures because they may not be in the same room or not know if an event is a seizure.
People taking anti-seizure medications may experience side effects including dizziness, fatigue, weight gain, speech problems, memory problems, and more. These side effects can be really bad, so much so that 40% of patients choose not to take their medications regularly. It can be difficult for people with epilepsy to communicate their side effects to clinicians and explain how the side effects are impacting them.
The Problem
With Unreliable Seizure Data, Doctors are Guessing
A Clinician’s Perspective
Patients expect their physician to make the best decisions possible with the goal of stopping seizures as fast as possible with minimal side effects. The problem is physicians rarely have an accurate picture of how patients are doing from a seizure standpoint and side effect tolerability.
With more than 99% of seizures occurring outside of the hospital setting, neurologists today must rely on patient-reported seizure data, which is the current standard of care as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Neurology. However, studies have shown patient-reported data to be more than 50% inaccurate!
This means that doctors are guessing which of the > 20 medicines are likely to work for a given patient. The current standard of care of patient-report data for measuring treatment outcomes results in a prolonged trial-and-error treatment cycle.
A Pharma Perspective
Pharmaceutical companies also rely on self-reported seizure data to measure the outcomes of their drug trials. However, given the inaccuracy of self-reported seizure data pharmaceutical companies have stayed away from developing new therapies for certain types of epilepsy. The current first line of therapies for absence epilepsy, the most common type of epilepsy in children, was developed more than 50 years ago. As one pharma company told us,
THE SOLUTION
Using a Patient’s Eye Movements, Doctors Can Get the Data They Need
AI based algorithms which can use eye movement, heart rate, skin conductance, and limited EEG electrode.
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I am a physician-scientist working in area of CBD medicine and I promote https://www.buy-swiss-cbd-ihs.com/redir-affiliation-186-79026.html as I prefer only highest grade Swiss CBD. If you wish to use CBD as complementary to existing medicines but not as alternative to your AEDs, please consult your physician. There are even FDA approved CBD based anti-epileptic drugs.
