Cincinnati Children's Receives $17.3 million Grant From NIH for Epilepsy Study
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center has been awarded a $17.3 million grant from the National Institute of Neurologic Disorders and Stroke, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for a study of childhood absence (petit mal) epilepsy.
The grant funds a head-to-head trial of the three most commonly used anti-epileptic drugs for absence seizures, which account for 10 percent of all cases of epilepsy in children. The goal is to determine the best initial medicine for childhood absence epilepsy.
The five-year study will enroll 439 children, ages 2-13, at 20 sites across the country. Cincinnati Children's is the coordinating center and also a test site. The grant is the largest ever for a pediatric epilepsy study, and the clinical trial will be the largest head-to-head drug trial ever conducted for pediatric epilepsy, according to Tracy Glauser, MD, director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program at Cincinnati Children's and principal investigator of the study.
In addition to the clinical trial, the grant funds pharmacokinetic and pharmacogenetic research at Cincinnati Children's. Pharmacokinetics is the study of how a drug's level in the body changes during the day. Pharmacogenetics is the study of how a person's genetic makeup affects how he or she responds to medications.
"We want to identify the factors underlying individual variations in response to therapy: Why some succeed and why some fail; why some have side effects and why some don't," says Dr. Glauser, a physician in the Division of Neurology at Cincinnati Children's. "We are also examining the drugs' affects on cognition, behavior and learning. This is the first step toward our goal of making it possible for physicians to predict patient response and tailor therapies for individual needs."
Childhood absence seizures are non-convulsive staring spells that tend to occur in clusters. Children with this inherited syndrome are otherwise normal. Some 80 percent outgrow the seizures.
Contact Information
Jim Feuer, 513-636-4656,
jim.feuer@cchmc.org
