Systematic Review: Retigabine for Adjunctive Therapy in Partial Epilepsy
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2011-07-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
There are a number of anti-epileptic drugs available for the treatment of partial onset
seizures in patients with epilepsy. This study is a systematic review of the published
literature on anti-epileptic drugs and is designed to compare the relative effectiveness and
tolerability of a selection of them with retigabine. The drugs chosen for this comparison
were lacosamide, pregabalin, tiagabine, zonisamide and eslicarbazepine. They were chosen
because they belong to the newer generation of drugs for epilepsy (as does retigabine) and
they have a similar license as well as having published data from studies that were conducted
in similar patient populations with similar methods. GSK commissioned YHEC (York Health
Economic Consortium) to carry out this review and analysis. YHEC identified relevant studies
from international databases. These studies had compared one of the chosen anti-epileptic
drugs with placebo. The results were pooled and combined in order to summarize the data for
individual drugs as well to compare the results for different drugs with each other and with
retigabine. Since none of the individual clinical studies compared one active drug with
another, this systematic review is an indirect comparison of these drugs, using an
established and recognised methodology which has well understood limitations.