Role for a video tool in educating youth with epilepsy about anticonvulsant and contraceptive drug interactions.

Purpose: Anti-seizure medications (ASM) can lower the efficacy of hormonal birth control (BC), while estrogen-containing BC can increase ASM metabolism, altering seizure frequency. Despite these adverse interactions, many youth with epilepsy demonstrate inadequate knowledge about this topic. Thus, there is a need to develop tools that empower youth with epilepsy to make more informed contraceptive decisions.

Water exchange across the blood-brain barrier and epilepsy: Review on pathophysiology and neuroimaging.

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a barrier protecting the brain and a milieu of continuous exchanges between blood and brain. There is emerging evidence that the BBB plays a major role in epileptogenesis and drug-resistant epilepsy, through several mechanisms, such as water homeostasis dysregulation, overexpression of drug transporters, and inflammation. Studies have shown abnormal water homeostasis in epileptic tissue and altered aquaporin-4 water channel expression in animal epilepsy models.