Patients with brain tumors and seizures should be treated with non-enzyme-inducing antiepileptic drugs (AED). Some of the newer drugs seem particularly suited in these patients.
Here we describe our experience with pregabalin (PGB); its effectiveness was retrospectively studied in nine consecutive patients with primary brain tumors and seizures.
Six subjects had secondarily generalized and three simple partial seizures. Patients mostly suffered from WHO grade IV gliomas. PGB replaced enzyme inducing, inefficacious or bad tolerated AED, as add-on or monotherapy. Median follow-up was 5 (2-19) months; three patients died of their tumor. Daily median dosage was 300 mg. All subjects experienced at least a 50% seizure reduction, six were seizure-free. Side effects were reported in four patients, leading to PGB discontinuation in two.
PGB appears to have a promising effectiveness in this setting, even as a monotherapy. Based on these results we embarked on a prospective controlled trial.