Patients with treatment-resistant epilepsy often cycle through multiple medications as they seek relief from the seizures that disrupt their lives. Yet in many cases, these drugs offer little benefit, reinforcing the long-held belief among experts that treatment-resistant epilepsy is a condition that remains stable at best - or gradually worsens over time.
A new study, however, challenges this longstanding notion by showing that a subset of these hard-to-treat patients do experience seizure relief, though researchers aren't exactly sure what's driving the improvement.
The study, published in JAMA Neurology, was part of the Human Epilepsy Project, a large, U.S.-based, observational study of patients with focal treatment-resistant epilepsy (FTRE) involving researchers from multiple institutions, including Yale neurologist Hamada Hamid Altalib.
For the study, researchers wanted to take a fresh look at whether seizure frequency in FTRE improves over time, and if so, why.
