View clinical trials related to Refractory Epilepsy.
Filter by:This is a single site, non-randomized, prospective, open-label, interventional pilot/feasibility study. Patients recruited will have medically-refractory focal neocortical epilepsy, defined on the basis of presence of focal spikes and (if available) focal seizure onsets originating from the lateral cortical surface of any lobe. All patients and referring physicians will be requested to maintain their current antiepileptic drugs throughout the study with changes after enrollment permitted only to maintain pre-enrollment drug levels, or if clinically necessary. The primary outcome measure will be the change in seizure frequency (seizures/week) as compared to baseline. Patients with medically-refractory neocortical epilepsy will receive cathodal tDCS administered to the seizure focus for 10 sessions over a 2-week period with the allowance of make-up sessions in week three. Subjects will be evaluated at baseline, during the stimulation sessions, and 8 weeks after the completion of the tDCS visits
Evaluate the long-term clinical effectiveness and safety of the PINS Deep Brain Stimulation to patients with refractory epilepsy.
This is a multi-center, open-label, crossover, pharmacokinetic, bio-availability study involving adolescents and adults with refractory (drug-resistant) epilepsy. Cohort 1 comprises the subjects used to determine the relative bioavailability of DZNS versus DRG (Diastat)
Evaluate the long-term clinical effectiveness and safety of the PINS vagus nerve stimulator to patients with refractory epilepsy.
The purpose of the study is to examine the clinical safety, tolerability, and efficacy of clobazam (Onfi) when it replaces the pre-existing clonazepam therapy in patients with refractory epilepsy.
One third of children with epilepsy have seizures that are medically intractable. Uncontrolled seizures pose a variety of risks to children, including higher rates of mortality, developmental delay and cognitive impairment. Epilepsy surgery is not a feasible option for most children with refractory epilepsy. The ketogenic diet and the modified Atkins diet have been shown to be effective alternative treatments in children with refractory epilepsy. However, these need parents to be educated, and understand complex instructions of weighing foods and diet preparation. Therefore, children with parents with low levels of literacy and poor socioeconomic status have not been able to benefit from these therapies. Also, the paucity of trained dieticians and limited availability of labeled foods in resource-constraint settings has made these dietary therapies even more inaccessible. This study aimed to to develop a simple-to-administer variation of the modified Atkins diet for use in children with refractory epilepsy and to evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of this simplified modified Atkins diet in children with refractory epilepsy in a randomized controlled open-label trial.
The modified Atkins diet is a non-pharmacologic therapy for intractable childhood epilepsy that was designed to be a less restrictive alternative to the traditional ketogenic diet. This diet is started on an outpatient basis without a fast, allows unlimited protein and fat, and does not restrict calories or fluids. Modified Atkins diet is of special importance in resource constraint settings with paucity of trained dieticians. However, there is paucity published data on the use of the modified Atkins diet in refractory epilepsy in young children. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of the modified Atkins diet in refractory epilepsy in young children.
There is a continuous necessity for the search of new alternatives for safe, affordable and effective noninvasive therapies for patients that are not eligible for focal resective or palliative surgery. The transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) therapy has demonstrated to be safe, noninvasive, simple and effective with promising results in case series, case reports and animals models for the treatment of intractable epilepsy. tDCS is a feasible and low cost method to modify cortical excitability in a non-invasive procedure. Its effects on cortical excitability seem to be similar to the effects induced by repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. The aim of this study is determine the safety and efficacy in the reduction of the number of seizures (>50%) and epileptiform activity in patients with refractory and multifocal epilepsy after different protocols of tDCS compared with placebo.
Epilepsy is a frequent cause of morbidity in the pediatric age group. Many catastrophic epilepsies present during infancy and childhood1. Seizures in these epileptic disorders are difficult to control; sometimes only at the expense of multiple and toxic levels of antiepileptic medications. The shortcomings of antiepileptic drug therapy and epilepsy surgery warrants the need for alternative treatments. Ketogenic diet is effective for refractory epilepsies (33% of patients with refractory epilepsy have more than 50% reduction in seizures from the baseline and 15-20% become seizure free) and has gained widespread acceptance. Low glycemic index diet treatment (LGIT) is designed as a variant of ketogenic diet. There are retrospective studies on LGIT in childhood refractory epilepsy reporting seizure reduction comparable to that of patients on ketogenic diet. There have been no randomized controlled trials assessing the efficacy of the low glycemic index diet in refractory epilepsy. In this study we plan to assess the efficacy of LGIT among children with drug refractory epilepsy.
The purpose of this observational registry is to evaluate the long-term effectiveness, safety and performance of market-released Medtronic Neuromodulation products for Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for the treatment of refractory epilepsy. In addition, healthcare resource use and patient reported outcomes, such as health related quality of life will be assessed.