Epidemiology of drug resistant epilepsy in adults

Abstract

This review examines the epidemiology of drug resistant epilepsy in adults in Russia and abroad. References were taken from Russian and foreign databases for the period from 2010-2017. Only full-text publications (66) were included in this review. We concluded that the despite the achievements of clinical pharmacology and the development of new antiepileptic drugs, the problem of drug resistant epilepsy remains not fully resolved today. The worldwide high prevalence rate of patients with drug resistant epilepsy substantiates the problem. Thus, the average incidence of this disease varies from 30% to 70%, depending on the type of epilepsy and background pathology, which is the cause of symptomatic epilepsy. However, we have faced the problem of the absence both in Russia and abroad of large multicenter studies on the epidemiology of drug resistant epilepsy in the analyzed period of time. We have also revealed the lack of a unified definition of the disease, which is probably one of the reasons for the insufficient number of epidemiological studies of drug resistant epilepsy in different countries of the world.