The three major anticonvulsants currently used for the treatment of grand ma1 and focal epilepsy are phenobarbitone (introduced into therapy in 1912), diphenylhydantoin (DPII) (introduced in 1938), and primidone (introduced in 1952). Fig. I illustrates the common structural features of these drugs, which presumably account for their common anticonvulsant properties and side-effects. There are s...

We describe a rapid method for precisely measuring concentrations of anticonvulsant drugs in serum. The simple procedure, adaptable to the clinical laboratory, can be used for the routine simultaneous measurement in sera of phenobarbital, primidone, dephenylhydantoin, and (or) ethosuximide. The extraction procedure requires no solvent evaporation and gives a good yield for primidone and quantit...

A high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method is described for the quantitative determination of primidone in tablets. A ground tablet sample is diluted directly in the mobile phase, at a concentration of about 1 mg/mL of primidone, mixed and deaerated, and filtered. The resulting solution is then quantitated by HPLC. The average spike recoveries for the 50 mg and 250 mg tablets were ...

Essential tremor (ET) is the most common pathological tremor characterized by upper limb action-postural tremor (PT)/kinetic tremor (KT). There are no specific neuropathological or biochemical abnormalities in ET. The disability is consequent to amplitude of KT, which may remain mild without handicap or may become disabling. The most effective drugs for sustained tremor control are propranolol ...

The effects of placebo, propranolol and primidone were compared in 14 patients with essential tremor in a double blind, randomised, crossover study. Objective measures of tremor were obtained using an accelerometer with subsequent spectral analysis. Both propranolol (p less than 0.01) and primidone (p less than 0.01) gave significant improvement in tremor, but there was no significant differenc...