Epilepsy Talk

New hope for drug resistant epilepsy… | April 6, 2025

Drug-resistant epilepsy with uncontrolled severe seizures — despite state-of-the-art medical treatment — continues to be a major problem for up to 30% of patients with epilepsy.

Although drug resistance may fluctuate in the course of treatment, for most patients, drug resistance seems to be continuous.

Unfortunately, traditional antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) don’t seem to prevent or reverse drug resistance in most patients.

However, some new add-on AED therapies have shown as much as 50% in seizure reduction.

This research concerns the structural brain lesions that have been associated with drug resistance in epilepsy.

British scientists believe they’ve uncovered the root cause of drug resistant epilepsy through tests on patients’ brain tissue which revealed some seizures are caused by electrical connections between nerve cells instead of chemical ones.

This faulty wiring would explain why traditional drugs are useless and why some patients have to resort to surgery to remove the brain tissue responsible for the seizures.

The researchers took brain tissue removed from people with epilepsy into the lab where, miraculously, they were able to coax it to behave as if it was still part of the living brain.

They were then able to record electrical signals from individual neurons and networks of neurons in the samples.

What they managed to record was an underlying “noise” — a particular type of brain wave — which occurs in the intact epileptic human brain and which scientists believe to be a precursor to an epileptic seizure.

They found that instead of being controlled by chemical signals which most conventional anti-epileptic drugs target, this variation relies on direct electrical connections.

Newcastle University’s Dr Mark Cunningham, the leader of the study, said the next step would be to understand what it is that triggers the transition between the underlying epileptic state of the brain cells and the fluctuating electrical signals that are responsible for causing a seizure.

Simon Wigglesworth of Epilepsy Action said: “This is exciting news for people whose epilepsy cannot be controlled by medication and an important development in our understanding of the condition.

Currently, there is no treatment to cure epilepsy other than surgery, which at the moment is only effective for small numbers.”

“We hope that this research will move us closer to effective treatment”.

To subscribe to Epilepsy Talk and get the latest articles, simply go to the bottom box of the right column, enter your email address and click on “Follow!”

Resources:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/2020/02/new-hope-for-disabling-epilepsy

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130151323.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8385790.stm

https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2024/10/medical-innovations-offer-hope-drug-resistant-epilepsy-patients

https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/video-when-seizures-dont-stop-the-battle-against-drug-resistant-epilepsy/

https://www.england.nhs.uk/2025/02/nhs-rolls-out-life-changing-treatment-offering-new-hope-for-hundreds-of-children-with-severe-epilepsy/

---