The challenges of treating epilepsy with 25 antiepileptic drugs

Nowadays a substantial armamentarium of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) is available, including drugs with different mechanisms of action, pharmacokinetics, efficacy and tolerability; therefore the choice for the right treatment is often challenging. The specific characteristic of the drug, the epileptic syndrome, seizure types and the patient's features need to be taken into consideration driving the choice through available evidence-based studies, which are often lacking for older AEDs. Besides, study conditions in registered clinical trials (RCTs) are quite different from daily clinical practice, which is more complex and various. When dealing with first diagnosed epilepsy, monotherapy is widely accepted as the gold standard option. Likewise, alternative monotherapy should be considered when the first drug treatment fails. However, the association of different AEDs in polytherapy is a common practice. The choice of AEDs used in association is often based on clinical experience or anecdotal observations or small clinical studies. Polytherapy should be as "rational" as possible and consider the mechanism of action, the pharmacokinetic characteristics and the safety of each drug. When dealing with drug resistant patients, clinicians should never give up and consider the use of AEDs acting on new targets. An attempt to come back to a monotherapy or simpler therapeutic regimen should be pursued even in patients who were previously drug resistant. This review will focus on the strategies to treat epilepsy by choosing among 25 available drugs.