Cognitive deficits in patients with bipolar disorder are likely to impair occupational and social functioning. In a post hoc analysis of data from a prospective, open-label study of lamotrigine in 1175 patients 13 years or older with bipolar I disorder, changes in the self-rated cognitive function scores of patients receiving lamotrigine as monotherapy or as adjunctive therapy were evaluated. L...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether first trimester exposure to lamotrigine (LTG) monotherapy is specifically associated with an increased risk of orofacial clefts (OCs) relative to other malformations, in response to a signal regarding increased OC risk. METHODS Population-based case-control study with malformed controls based on EUROCAT congenital anomaly registers. The study population covere...

OBJECTIVE To assess the risk of major congenital malformations (MCMs) in association with maternal use of valproic acid (VPA) in monotherapy or adjunctive therapy, and its relationship with dose. METHODS The analysis was based on prospectively acquired data from EURAP, a registry enrolling women treated with antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) in early pregnancy, in which the primary outcome is presen...

PURPOSE To study the effect of AED exposure on head circumference in the newborn. METHODS Data on all Swedish singletons births between 1995 and 2005, over 900,000 births, were obtained from the Swedish Medical Birth Registry. The effects of AEDs on birth-weight-adjusted mean head circumference (bw-adj-HC) were estimated by comparison with data from all births in an analysis which was adjuste...

OBJECTIVE The widely prescribed anticonvulsants phenytoin and carbamazepine are potent inducers of cytochrome P450 enzymes, which are involved in cholesterol synthesis. We sought to determine whether these drugs have an effect on cholesterol and other serological markers of vascular risk. METHODS We recruited 34 epilepsy patients taking carbamazepine or phenytoin in monotherapy whose physicia...

The role of combination therapy as a treatment strategy for epilepsy is undergoing reevaluation. A growing appreciation that all seizures cannot be controlled by monotherapy and the introduction of over 14 new antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) for the adjunctive treatment in refractory epilepsy in the past twenty years has triggered an renewed interest in combination therapy. However, the experimental...