How I Treat... Refractory Epilepsy

What is epilepsy? Epilepsy is defined as a disease of the brain characterised by a lasting predisposition to generate epileptic seizures, which, in practice, means having two or more unprovoked seizures separated a minimum of 24 hours.

Epilepsy is one of the most common chronic neurological disorders in dogs and cats. Epilepsy is considered refractory when the quality of life of the patient is affected by the frequency of epileptic seizures or the adverse effects of the medication despite being treated with medication within the therapeutic range (at least with 2 antiepileptic drugs).

Most patients are erroneously diagnosed with refractory epilepsy because the episodes suffered by the animal have a non-epileptic origin or medications are not used properly (not in the maximum therapeutic range, failure of the owner's compliance...). It must also be considered that patients with structural epilepsy (tumour, inflammatory, infectious, congenital) may have an increased frequency of epileptic seizures due to a worsening of the underlying cause. Treatment in these cases should also be focused on treating the underlying ...