Treatment of epilepsy in daily clinical practice: have outcomes improved over the past 10 years?

In the past decade, many new antiepileptic drugs have become available, but their influence on patient outcomes in daily practice is not well known. In a community-based study, we assessed changes in epilepsy treatment and outcomes over a 10-year period. We compared two cross-sectional community-based samples that were obtained from the same Dutch suburban region in 2000 and 2010 using pharmacy records for recruitment, including 344 and 248 epilepsy patients, respectively. The main outcome was self-reported quality of life (QoL, using the QOLIE-31). Potential predictors of QoL (adverse effects, seizure control, seizure acceptability, demographic, epilepsy- or treatment-related determinants) were assessed by multivariable linear regression. New antiepileptic drugs were used by 9 % of patients in 2000 and 34 % in 2010, P < 0.001. More than 80 % in both samples reported to be treated by a neurologist. We found no significant differences in QOLIE-31 scores (72.57 vs. 72.44), or in the proportion of patients with complete seizure control (51 vs. 54 %), between the two study samples. Seizure control and adverse effects were important independent predictors of quality of life, explaining 58 % of the variance. We found no evidence that in this community the QoL of epilepsy patients has improved in the last decade, despite unrestricted availability of healthcare resources, including accessibility to new AEDs. The relatively low proportion with complete seizure control and the high rate of adverse effects in these community-based samples suggest that the effectiveness of epilepsy treatment is still far from optimal.