PROGNOSIS AND CLINICAL-FEATURES OF INTRACTABLE EPILEPSY - A PROSPECTIVE-STUDY

Of the epileptic patients who were treated for greater than or equal t o 5 years until the end of 1990 and had more than four seizures in 199 0, 63 patients had been treated without interruption until the end of 1995. We analyzed their clinical courses from 1990 to 1995 prospective ly. More than half the subjects were diagnosed with temporal lobe epil epsy. Twenty cases had presumed etiology, and 32 had neuropsychiatric complications. Of the subjects whose seizures were not controlled with conventional antiepileptic drugs (AED), 11 cases demonstrated signifi cant improvement when new AED; that is, lamotrigine, vigabatrin, cloba zam, topiramate, tiagabine or CGP33101 were added. However, 10 patient s did not respond to new AED. Presumed etiology, neuropsychiatric comp lications, multiple epileptic foci in EEG and abnormalities on head CT or MRI were characteristics of the patients whose seizures were resis tant to new AED.