Weed out the seizures

Just when you thought there was little new in epilepsy therapeutics, there comes a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of a novel compound in 120 people with Dravet syndrome. The fact that this also provides the first class I evidence for the use of cannabidiol in epilepsy, and that the trial participants had an epileptic encephalopathy (defined by multiple seizures types that are pharmacoresistant), makes this all the more astonishing. Convulsive seizures decreased from 12.4 to 5.9 per month with treatment (14.9–14.1 with placebo), p=0.01. As expected, there were more adverse events in the cannabidiol group, such as gastrointestinal symptoms fatigue, fever, somnolence and abnormal liver function tests; these …