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Antiepileptic drugs in psychiatry

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
F Ovsiew
Department of Psychiatry MC 3077, University of Chicago Hospitals, 5841 S. Maryland, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; f-ovsiew@uchicago.edu

Keywords: antiepileptic drugs; anxiety disorder; bipolar mood disorder; side effects

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) have been widely used by psychiatrists to treat disorders other than epilepsy for two decades. Here I survey those uses and selectively review the side effects of AEDs in the psychiatric context.

AEDs are now so widely used for non-epileptic indications that the appellation "anti-epileptic drug" may verge on mislabelling (to paraphrase David Healy’s comment about serotonin-reuptake inhibitors and "antidepressants"). Nonetheless, no better designation is available, and I refer to these drugs as AEDs. Oddly, the newer AEDs may prove be more useful in psychiatric illness than in epilepsy, where their greater efficacy than the older agents has not yet been conclusively demonstrated.¹

An assumption that the mechanisms of action of AEDs are the same in epilepsy and in psychiatric disorders would go beyond the evidence. Activity against kindling has been proposed to explain the psychotropic effect,² but this seems to account for neither the . . . [Full text of this article]

This article has been cited by other articles:

				E. Brodtkorb and M. Mula Optimizing therapy of seizures in adult patients with psychiatric comorbidity Neurology, December 26, 2006; 67(12_suppl_4): S39 - S44. [Abstract] [Full Text]