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Participants
, Justine Flotteron , Susan T. Herman MD, William Rosenfeld MD, Blanca Vazquez MD
Summary
Accepting a diagnosis of epilepsy can mean a life-long commitment to medication. Listen to the story of a young woman who found the right balance for the control of her seizures.
Webcast Transcript
JUSTINE FLOTTERON: Mine are more fainting spells. I'm under control with medication, but they started as a simple, falling down, zoning out like if somebody was talking to me
ANNOUNCER: Justine Flotteron is one of over two million Americans with epilepsy, a neurologic condition that makes people susceptible to seizures.
BLANCA VAZQUEZ, MD: The social impact of epilepsy is such as in families in the old days no one talked about it. Socially it can affect your relationship with your peers. It can affect your relationship with your significant other. Epilepsy does have a lot of negative connotations
JUSTINE FLOTTERON: I refused to even believe that I had it even once I was diagnosed with it. I didn't take medication for years. I refused to.
ANNOUNCER: Justine suffers from a type of epilepsy known as partial seizure. Without treatment, Justine continually had seizures.
JUSTINE FLOTTERON: I used to sit at my desk and I'd fall on the ground. A minute later, get back up, sit back down in my seat. Nothing was disturbed or anything. It was like kids were used to it. I was used to it.
ANNOUNCER: Then something happened when she was in the hospital for an unrelated surgery.
JUSTINE FLOTTERON: At this time I was probably 17. It was after a major surgery when I was coming out of the anesthesia, I had a grand mal seizure. That's actually when I first started taking medication.
BLANCA VAZQUEZ, MD: We aim for a patient complete control of seizures and minimizing side effects for that patient.
ANNOUNCER: Initially Justine started on a combination of drugs which were partially effective, but the medications' side effects were creating even more problems for Justine.
JUSTINE FLOTTERON: I was having double vision constantly, which really is just terrible, and it gets you nauseous. You lose your equilibrium.
ANNOUNCER: Dr. Blanca Vasquez, Justine's physician, tried to be her patient's advocate.
JUSTINE FLOTTERON: She was like, "We need to get you off these medicines. There are other things out there. There are newer drugs out there that can be doing better for you
ANNOUNCER: Eventually Justine tried a newer class of drugs, providing better seizure control with a single medication.
JUSTINE FLOTTERON: Honestly I know to this day things are a lot better. I mean, yes, I still have my normal one or two seizures. But to me one or two a month is nothing. I used to have three to five a day when I was younger.
ANNOUNCER: The side effects on the new drugs are so small to even none. Taking just one kind of drug has finally simplified the delicate balance between effectiveness and side effects.
WILLIAM ROSENFELD, MD: We always try for monotherapy. The reason we try for monotherapy is that one drug usually will give you less side effects than two drugs.
Now, clearly there are, even in monotherapy, drugs that do have more side effects, but when you add more than one drug together, you clearly end up with a higher number of medication side effects.
ANNOUNCER: Convenience is also a plus, and Justine now takes only one medication twice a day.
WILLIAM ROSENFELD, MD: Many of the new drugs are better in terms of twice a day dosing, and that makes it much better for patients in terms of compliance.
ANNOUNCER: Deciding which therapy is right for each patient is determined by several factors.
BLANCA VAZQUEZ, MD: The selection of antiepileptic drugs is always based on what seizure type the patient has. The newer generations of drugs are approved for partial epilepsy.
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