Severity of anxiety and depression are related to a higher perception of adverse effects of antiepileptic drugs

Abstract

Adverse effects to AEDs can be related with the presence of psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression in patients with epilepsy.

Anxiety disorders in people with epilepsy

“…An explanation, however, may be that patients attribute seizures to irrelevant factors and thus experience anxiety. Anxiety (and also depression) is associated with the presence of adverse events (AE) to antiepileptic drugs (Gomez-Arias et al, 2012, Jacoby et al, 2015. This is actually a finding that may have a major impact on clinical practice: It can be speculated that it might be necessary in patients who report a high number or severity of AE to focus on a comorbid anxiety or mood disorder rather than merely on changing the antiepileptic drug regimen.…”

“…The authors speculate that anxious patients have lower confidence and more difficulty remembering to take AEDs and following the prescriptions of doctors. In shed of the above-mentioned study (Gomez-Arias et al, 2012) it might also be possible that they experience more side-effects and thus are prone to be non-compliant. A high level of anxiety is also associated with perceived stigma in persons with newly diagnosed epilepsy (Lee et al, 2015).…”

Algorithms of mono- and polytherapy in clinical epileptology

“…Аналогичные результаты были получены и в другом исследовании [76], в котором статистически значимой разницы показателей НЯ, тревоги и депрессии при ис-пользовании моно-и политерапии не получено. Многие авторы отмечают, что при применении в качестве доба-вочной терапии ПЭП последнего поколения, отмечается лучший профиль переносимости политерапии [77,78].…”

Baseline Psychiatric Evaluations Are Needed to Treat Seizures

“…Self-report depression symptoms are related to adverse AED effects in both nontertiary epilepsy patients (3) and in tertiary clinic patients on AED polytherapy (4). Furthermore, mood/emotion is one of the AED adverse event profile scores related to quality of life in new onset seizure patients on lowdose AED above and beyond effects of depression and seizure frequency (5).…”