Pharmacologic treatment
from wikipedia.org
Some medications can be taken daily in order to prevent seizures altogether or reduce the frequency of their occurrence. These are termed "anticonvulsant" or "antiepileptic" drugs (sometimes AEDs). All such drugs have side effects that are idiosyncratic and others that are dosage-dependent. It is not possible to predict who will suffer from side effects or at what dose the side effects will appear.
Some people with epilepsy will experience a complete remission when treated with an anticonvulsant medication. If this does not occur, the dose of medication may be increased, or another medication may be added to the first. The general strategy is to increase the medication dose until either the seizures are controlled, or until dose-limiting side effects appear; at which point the medication dose is reduced to the highest amount that did not produce undesirable side effects.
Serum levels of AEDs can be checked to determine medicatio compliance and to assess the effects of drug-drug interactions; some physicians do not use serum levels to fine tune medication, but other physicians believe that serum levels provide excellent data for tailoring medications to suit an individual's specific and relatively variable body chemistry. For example, therapeutic doses (the dose at which seizures are controlled and side effects are minimal and tolerable) may vary widely from among patients. The therapeutic ranges provided by pharmaceutical companies are only ranges and by using blood serum levels and seizures diaries, better seizure control can sometimes be reached. In some cases (such as a seizure flurry) serum levels can be useful to know if the level is very high or very low.
If a person's epilepsy cannot be brought under control after adequate trials of two or three (experts vary here) different drugs, that person's epilepsy is generally said to be 'medically refractory.'
