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New drug could help people with epilepsy, says NICE guidance
A recently licensed drug that helps control seizures in adults who have epilepsy could soon be recommended for use in the NHS. This comes as draft guidance from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) out today (17 June) provisionally advises that retigabine (also called Trobalt, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline) could be prescribed as an add-on treatment option if other medicines have been ineffective or produced unmanageable side effects.
Professor Ley Sander, Epilepsy Society chair in epilepsy, said: “Epilepsy Society welcomes the latest draft guidance from NICE regarding retigabine as an add on treatment for epilepsy. Around a third of people with epilepsy struggle to gain seizure control and new treatment options offer hope for the future.”
You can read the full press release from NICE below:
People with epilepsy often need to take a combination of drugs to control their seizures. NICE provisionally recommends retigabine as an add-on (adjunctive) treatment option for adults with partial onset seizures (with or without secondary generalisation) who have not responded well to the following drugs: carbamazepine, clobazam, gabapentin, lamotrigine, levetiracetam, oxcarbazepine, sodium valproate and topiramate. The draft decision means that people with epilepsy may soon have another treatment option on the NHS to help control their seizures.
Professor Carole Longson, Director of the Health Technology Evaluation Centre at NICE said: “Seizures can be extremely debilitating as they can interfere with a person’s social life, employment and other daily activities. While there are a number of effective anti-epileptic drugs already widely available on the NHS, people can have different responses to them. It’s therefore very important for doctors to have a broad range of options so that they can find the right combination for their patients.
“Our draft guidance sets out the circumstances where retigabine could be used as an additional option to treat partial onset seizures for adults who have epilepsy and whose previous treatments have not worked. We are very pleased to able to issue these draft recommendations so soon after retigabine’s regulatory approval. Once published, we hope that our final guidance will lead to even more people having greater control of the condition.”
Retigabine was licensed for use by the European Medicines Agency in March this year, however NHS healthcare settings across England and Wales are not legally obliged to allocate funding for it.
The draft guidance (called a final appraisal determination) is now with interested third parties, who have the opportunity to appeal against the proposed guidance and highlight any factual errors.
If NICE does not receive any appeals then final guidance will be published in July 2011. Until NICE issues its final guidance, NHS bodies should make decisions locally on the funding of specific treatments.
