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Epilepsy has other effects on lifestyle, often because transportation is so difficult and job restrictions in general because of the seizures can make it difficult to get to job interviews, maintain a job, and it's such a challenge for my epilepsy patients. We know that the rate of unemployment can be as high as 50% in epilepsy patients, and this is such a huge issue because health insurance is critical for these patients to be able to get their medications and get the care that they need. So it's a big problem.
Epilepsy has other effects on lifestyle, often because transportation is so difficult and job restrictions in general because of the seizures can make it difficult to get to job interviews, maintain a job, and it's such a challenge for my epilepsy patients. We know that the rate of unemployment can be as high as 50% in epilepsy patients, and this is such a huge issue because health insurance is critical for these patients to be able to get their medications and get the care that they need. So it's a big problem.
Epilepsy can have a big effect on a patient's life and lifestyle and a couple of things to sort of think about one, epilepsy and, and sort of life in general is specifically things like driving, getting around. Epilepsy and driving is a state-specific issue. Each state has its own laws and own ways of sort of approaching it. In Arizona, the law says that one you're supposed to report to the department of motor vehicles if you have epilepsy. And then if you have a seizure that causes alteration of consciousness, you can't drive for three months. After three months, there's a form to fill out by the physician that allows you to drive again. Other things that, you know, people don't always think about if they're having seizures that can be dangerous. Swimming alone, very dangerous. Working at heights, working with heavy machinery, and problems can occur with respect to job and professions such as, anything that involves driving a motor vehicle, truck driver or operating heavy machinery such as at a mine. Things like that can be difficult jobs for someone with epilepsy to have, mostly because they're dangerous.
Insurance and epilepsy can be a little bit of a challenge. And I speak from my perspective, which is one: insurance is often we'll have very specific medications that they would prefer covering, medications you have to try first before trying the next medication. Often, Medicaid for instance, will ask for something called a prior authorization. And so the physician can say, look, I think this is the right drug for you. And the insurance company says, look, you can't use that drug first. You've got to try a few other drugs before you get there. And we just have to navigate that individually with the patient themselves and their insurance with respect to getting insurance. Having epilepsy as a prior diagnosis shouldn't be an impediment to getting insurance. But that's not something I can really sort of comment on too much. I haven't had much experience with that.
There are a lot of great organizations to help with epilepsy. The best one that's been around the longest in Arizona is The Epilepsy Foundation of Arizona. They're based out of Phoenix. They have an outreach though to every city in Arizona and they're a fantastic organization to get involved with. So The Epilepsy Foundation is a national organization. They have a headquarters and then each state though has their own sort of area that they run it themselves. And so, you know, it's a national organization. They fund, you know, studies. They do all kinds of fantastic work in treatment prevention of epilepsy and getting the word out on epilepsy. But it's run statewide here and the, you know, the president currently is Suzanne Metso Mauri, who is fantastic and eager to help anybody who has any questions, concerns, can feed them information, and can be involved as an advocate in any way they like.
And then looking at an alternative treatments for epilepsy. And so, there are a few things that have sort of been been developing. So one was this neuropace device, which is relatively recently approved and we're looking at new ways to use this. But the neuropace device is a device where if we know where the seizures coming from and we can't remove that part of the brain or don't want to remove that part of the brain, we can put this electrode on where that seizure is coming from, and it detects a seizure whether you're aware of it or not and can stop the seizure in its tracks. And that has a potential utility in treating types of epilepsy that we couldn't treat in any good way. And so an example would be someone who has seizures coming from both temporal lobes. We can't remove both temporal lobes because that would give you lots of problems specifically with memory. But with the neuropace device, we can actually put those electrodes on the temporal lobes on both sides and it could be detecting where the seizures are coming from and stop them. Another device that sort of out there is a deep brain stimulator and which is something we use very frequently for Parkinson's disease. This is a device where there's actually an electrode that's implanted into the brain, into a part of the brain called the Thalamus, which is a relay area of the brain. And there this, this device can actually electrically stimulate the brain itself causing reduction in seizure frequency. There've been some trials on this that have been promising, although hasn't been approved yet and probably need some more studies down the line. You know, with respect to treatment, there are always new things sort of being evaluated and examined. And even beyond that sort of devices that we have being tweaked, like the vagal nerve stimulator, there are potential changes to the vagal nerve stimulator that might make it more effective down the line. Like an ability for the device itself to detect seizures on its own and Zap that vagus nerve on its own to help abbreviate a seizure so that a person doesn't have to swipe it themselves. It just automatically goes. So there's some exciting new things coming along the pikes and always new things kind of coming out there. We're very excited about any and all new therapies to treat this disease.
There is a lot of research going on in epilepsy, constantly looking for better treatments. It's kind of interesting and one of the frustrating sort of realities that we've dealt with, which is that over the last 20 to 30 years, we've had an explosion on number of medications. And I point out that, you know, a drug we use today, was Dilantin, was a drug that we really discovered in the 1930s and was the most commonly prescribed drug until relatively recently. And because, you know, of the boom in medications, we've had you know, again, over 20 different anticonvulsants on the market. But one of the frustrating things that we've seen is that with all of these new medications, we haven't seen a reduction in how frequently we control someone's epilepsy. And so the number of about roughly give or take 60, 65% of patients respond to medications and 30 to 35% continue to have seizures. That hasn't changed in the last 30 years. So all of these things that we've done haven't had quite the effect on controlling epilepsy that we want. So with respect to research, there are a few things going on. First and foremost, new medications in the pipelines, medications using novel or new mechanisms of action, ideally maybe with more effectiveness, less side effects, and so there are definitely new medications being developed from that end.
So the future of epilepsy treatment is unclear. What I hope to see in the not so distant future is what we call a pharmacogenomic approach to sort of treatment of epilepsy. And so this does get to a little bit to the genetics in some ways. And that is, you know, one of the things I feel most powerless to sort of prevent or, or handle is, you know, I don't know how you're going to respond to any medication. And this is true for any disease entity, not just epilepsy, but it's so important in epilepsy because there's so many medications that we have to choose from. And so the notion from my end would be, it would be great to be able to take your blood and sample it and be able to sort of see, oh wow, here's the medication that you're going to respond to. You know, we should use levatarazatam and not carbamazepine or, you know, and so give me something to help guide me on what medications work well for you.
You know, there are technologies that are being further developed with respect to being able to localize or nail down that seizure focus. And I'll point out again, surgery can be such a useful treatment for patients. And so the idea would be what other ways can we be certain about where with the seizure focus is? And there's a device called a MEG, magneto encephalogram which can basically help nail down where the seizure focus is and it can see electrical fields coming out of your brain and be able to sort of nail down where exactly the seizure focus is based on those fields and those electrical fields. The other thing would be that, you know, I envision that, you know, being more effective and more aggressive with surgery. I think that there's such good data that says that surgery is effective in controlling seizures, especially in people who are refractory and continue to have seizures despite two or three medication trials. And I think we need to get that message out to that to the public and get more aggressive in general about treating patients, because the effects of epilepsy long term are significant. Not only does it affect your ability to enjoy life because you're always worried about, you know, when's the next seizure going to happen? What's the next sort of disaster? You can't drive. You can't go swimming alone. You can't work at heights. Working in general is a challenge. And so, attacking those are, you know, getting seizures controlled, is so incredibly crucial.
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