Study of Hormonal Sideeffects in Patients Taking Levetiracetam, Carbamazepine or Lamotrigine for Epilepsy

Overview

Some antiepileptic drugs are found to have hormonal side effects. We want to study possible hormonal side effects of the relatively new antiepileptic drug; levetiracetam and compare it to the older drugs; lamotrigine and carbamazepine. The participants are going to fill in a questionnaire and we will collect blood samples from them, to analyse hormones.

We have previously performed long-term studies of rats treated with levetiracetam and compared them with a control group. Here we have found that levetiracetam has a probable effect on the ovaries, since the treated animals had larger ovaries, fewer cysts, more corpora lutea and more secondary follicles than the untreated animals (Taubøll et al 2004). Blood tests on the animals showed that those treated with levetiracetam had higher testosterone levels and lower levels of estrogen and FSH, whilst LH and progesterone levels were unaffected by the treatment (Svalheim et al, 2005a, b). Studies on cell cultures from pig ovaries, as carried out by our group in collaboration with Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, appeared to support these findings (Taubøll et al. 2006, submitted). Our wish therefore now is to study fertile men and women in order to look for any changes in the balance of sex hormones during use of levetiracetam in order to establish whether the findings in animal trials are clinically relevant to humans.

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