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When a person receives an initial diagnosis of epilepsy, the first question asked of the physician is “Why?” But the next question is “Can the seizures be controlled?” Our ability to answer that question is inadequate, even though the question of prognosis is implicit in every subsequent clinical interaction. At every visit, we as clinicians project the hope that our next maneuver will be the magic bullet. In this issue of Neurology®, Hughes et al.,1 analyzing the outcomes of 1,752 participants in the Standard and New Antiepileptic Drug (SANAD) study of new-onset epilepsy in the United Kingdom,2 report a new algorithm for the prediction of seizure control. Recognizing that prognosis is a moving target, they have developed a method for assessing it at each visit. They report that as time goes by in each person's course, it is possible to be more and more accurate in forecasting the patient’s condition. This sounds like a truism for any disease, but the course of epilepsy varies so much between individuals that quantitative data are especially welcome.
Footnotes
Go to Neurology.org/N for full disclosures. Funding information and disclosures deemed relevant by the authors, if any, are provided at the end of the editorial.
See page 995
- © 2018 American Academy of Neurology
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