Epilepsy is estimated to afflict around 12 million people in India. Medications are the first line of therapy for this condition. Surgery would be a great choice of therapy for such patients but given the limited availability of resources and surgical centers, medical therapy remains the mainstay for most of these patients.

  Cost remains the major limiting factor for medication use. Studies worldwide show that most of the developing countries have patients that are able to spend less than 1$ / 50-70 Rs. Per day for their seizure medications. Rural parts of India certainly face this problem more acutely, although urban India is not spared from financial restrictions either. Newer medications offer greater difficulties with cost, although easy availability of generic options does offset some of these difficulties. Additional problems are faced due to the presence of sub-standard quality generic medications and spurious or fake products, which make it difficult to know if failure of therapy is true or not. Costs are especially limiting when the patient is forced to use multiple medications or higher doses of therapy for seizure control. Many patients show limited or poor compliance with the use of fewer doses often limiting their seizure control and quality of life. Increasing availability and maintenance of costs do make things relatively easier for patients but more needs to be done in this regard to improve availability and affordability of pharmacotherapy for epilepsy.

References

Citation

Citation: Arun Swaminathan. “Challenges with Pharmacotherapy of Epilepsy in India”. Acta Scientific Clinical Case Reports 1.2 (2020): 01-02.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Arun Swaminathan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.