Changing Agendas on Sleep, Treatment and Learning in Epilepsy
Status:
Terminated
Trial end date:
2020-09-23
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Rolandic epilepsy (RE) is the most common type of epilepsy. Children with RE have seizures
and can often find that their learning, sleep, behaviour, self-esteem and mood are affected.
As part of standard NHS care, children diagnosed with RE may be treated with standard
anti-epileptic medicines, like carbamazepine, or no medicine at all. The medicines used to
treat epilepsy often slow down a child's thinking and learning. In the past, doctors believed
this was an acceptable price to pay to reduce seizures. However, with RE, where the seizures
usually stop in teenage years, investigators do not know if it is better to treat these
children with medicines or not, especially if the medicines might have a negative effect on
their learning.
A newer medicine called levetiracetam has also been found to work in children with RE and has
shown less problems with thinking and learning in adults. However, it is still no known if
this is also the case for children and it has not been proven which of the three options
(carbamazepine, levetiracetam or no treatment) would be best for RE patients. The CASTLE
study aims to find this out.
In addition, it has been found that seizures often happen when a child has had poor sleep and
they often come at night or early in the morning. It has been shown that sleep can be
improved through practice without the need of medicines. There are established guidelines to
help toddlers go to sleep, but nothing available that helps young people with epilepsy and
their parents improve their sleep quality. In the CASTLE study, a sleep training plan has
been developed for children with epilepsy and the trial aims to find out whether following
this sleep training plan results in less seizures than using no sleep training at all.
Phase:
Phase 4
Details
Lead Sponsor:
King's College London
Collaborators:
Bangor University Edge Hill University King's College Hospital NHS Trust Oxford Brookes University University of Liverpool