Antiepileptic Drug Can Reduce Recurrent Stroke by 53%

 

A recent study conducted on around 12,000 patients revealed that epilepsy drug that contains (HDAC9) Histone Deacetylase 9 was linked to greatly reducing recurrent stroke by 53%. This is according to the information published in January Issue of Stroke.

The researchers from Welcome Trust Case Control Consortium found that there is an association between heightened risk of recurrent stroke and mutation in HDAC9. This results from large artery illnesses.

Valproate Reduces Risk of Recurrent Stroke

In all the patients involved, a total of 138 patients received valproate and 530 were given other AEDs. Recurrent stroke was seen to occur in about 17 patients who received valproate, 1426 of the 11,312 who were not given AEDs, 1,470 patients of 11,781 who were not given valproate and 105 of those who received other AEDs.

It was noted that stroke survival was greater among those patients who received valproate compared to others who did not. In addition to this, the stroke-free survival was at 86% among patients receiving valproate at year 15; this is compared to 74% who never received valproate.

The difference between the survival in valproate exposure and non-exposure was not much for nonselective control populations. The difference in valproate exposure and other AEDs exposure was much significant. On the other hand, the difference in valproate exposure and other AEDs exposure for selective control population were not much. This was the same case between the valproate exposure as well as other AEDs exposures.

Researchers noted that valproate showed a reduced risk of stroke in hazard models compared to patients without valproate exposure.

How Accurate was this Research?

The researchers indicated that the nature of their research could be prone to errors both systematic and random errors. This cannot infer causality because the results gave some evidence for restudy hypothesis. It suggested that sodium valproate, HDAC inhibitor may not be linked to a reduction in stroke recurrence rate.

Researchers failed to have the exact dates of when the patients began taking medication. What they did is that they used the first followup date as the start date. The other limitation was that they lacked enough data to fully test the effects of different doses.

The researchers also pointed out that sodium valproate is an unspecified HDAC inhibitor and that it also has other actions. This meant that a more specified inhibitor could bring better effects in reducing the risk of recurrent stroke.

In addition to this, the relationship between the reduced stroke risk and SVA needs more research and investigations in randomized trials of this specific drug and other HDAC9 inhibitors.

A lot needs to be done to verify that antiepileptic drug reduces the risk of recurrent stroke by about 53%. When this is proved, it will be one of the major breakthroughs for those patients who suffer from a recurrent stroke. More and more trials need to be done and more people need to participate in the trials so that scientists will be able to verify the effectiveness of epilepsy drugs in reducing recurrent stroke.