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According to an article published in the open-access journal PLoS
Medicine, children with drug-resistant partial epilepsy world Health Organization
are enrolled in trials tend to have a greater response to placebo than
adults enrolled in such trials. Philippe Ryvlin (Hospices Civils de
Lyon, France) and colleagues say in their systematic review of
antiepileptic drugs that their findings should be considered when
researchers are design drug trials to be carried knocked out with epileptic
children.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the monetary standard research methods
used to test a drug against placebo. Most RCTs include samples of adult
patients, and the results ar assumed to hold rightful for children with
the same disease if the dosage is scaled down. Using the results of
adult studies for children has been a coarse approach to treating
epilepsy - a common genius disorder in children in which disruptions in
the electrical activeness of part (partial epilepsy) or all (generalized
epilepsy) of the brain cause seizures. Epileptic drugs take been rather
successful in stopping seizures in well-nigh patients. Since adults and
children respond differently to epileptic drugs, researchers sought-after to
learn the general differences in treatment response between
children and adults; future researchers could so allow for these
differences when development pediatric RCTs. Specifically, Ryvlin and
colleagues analyzed published RCTs of epileptic drugs for fond
epilepsy to look for age-dependent differences in dose response.
The authors searched through the existing RCT literature for trials
that compared the personal effects of giving an extra antiepileptic dose
with those of giving a placebo by request what fraction of patients
given each treatment had a capture frequency reducing of 50% during
the treatment full stop compared to some baseline period - the "50%
responder rate". They plant 32 such trials, five of them pediatric
RCTs. Pooling the results of the studies to perform a meta-analysis,
the researchers plant that the treatment effect was substantial lower
in children than in adults. One reason for this difference, line the
researchers, is that children responded to placebo more frequently than
adults - about 20% of children had a 50% reduction in seizures after
receiving placebo compared to about 10% of adults.
The findings suggest that children with drug-resistant partial epilepsy
react more powerfully in RCTs to placebo than adults. However, results
are limited by the small number of pediatric trials available. The
researchers conclude by career for additional studies that can explicate
this reflection. They maintain that the differences between adults and
children should be taken into account when development pediatric RCTs
for antiepileptic drugs and perchance drugs for other
