Systematic Review: Retigabine for Adjunctive Therapy in Partial Epilepsy

Systematic Review: Retigabine for Adjunctive Therapy in Partial Epilepsy

There are a number of anti-epileptic drugs available for the treatment of partial onset seizures in patients with epilepsy. This study is a systematic review of the published literature on anti-epileptic drugs and is designed to compare the relative effectiveness and tolerability of a selection of them with retigabine. The drugs chosen for this comparison were lacosamide, pregabalin, tiagabine, zonisamide and eslicarbazepine. They were chosen because they belong to the newer generation of drugs for epilepsy (as does retigabine) and they have a similar license as well as having published data from studies that were conducted in similar patient populations with similar methods. GSK commissioned YHEC (York Health Economic Consortium) to carry out this review and analysis. YHEC identified relevant studies from international databases. These studies had compared one of the chosen anti-epileptic drugs with placebo. The results were pooled and combined in order to summarize the data for individual drugs as well to compare the results for different drugs with each other and with retigabine. Since none of the individual clinical studies compared one active drug with another, this systematic review is an indirect comparison of these drugs, using an established and recognised methodology which has well understood limitations.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Have participated to a study that meets the following criteria:
• Be a study of retigabine, eslicarbazepine, lacosamide, zonisamide, pregabalin or tiagabine as an adjuvant therapy, compared to placebo or another drug;
• Be a randomized, placebo-controlled, add-on trial, or a parallel trial or cross-over trial in which data from the first treatment period could be treated as a parallel study;
• Have recruited patients with drug-resistant partial epilepsy (i.e., simple partial, complex partial, and/or secondarily generalised tonic-clonic seizures not controlled by at least 1 or more other AEDs);
• Have a maintenance treatment period of 8 weeks or longer, with a prospective baseline of minimum 4 weeks.

Exclusion Criteria:

• N/A