Medical cannabis can have a positive effect on the quality of life and symptoms of epilepsy in patients who live with treatment-resistant epilepsy (TRE), according to data from the UK Medical Cannabis Registry.
The study, published in the journal Brain and Behavior, revealed significant improvements in patient-reported outcomes after six months of cannabis-based treatment, with nearly one-third of participants reporting substantial positive changes to their epilepsy symptoms and quality of life.
Researchers analysed data from 134 patients prescribed cannabis medicines in the UK who had previously failed to respond to conventional epilepsy treatments. Participants self-reported details about their quality of life, sleep patterns, anxiety levels, and epilepsy symptoms through questionnaires over a six-month period.
The results show that at the end of the six months, 30% of patients reported that cannabis medicines were making a “significantly positive change” to their epilepsy, quality of life, and sleep and anxiety levels.
Adverse outcomes (AEs), where a patient has a negative reaction to a medication, were only reported by 3.5% of the cohort, which demonstrates a high safety profile for cannabis medicines in this context.
“The results suggest an association between initiating CBMP treatment and an improvement in patient‐reported epilepsy‐specific outcomes, alongside improvements in anxiety, sleep quality, and general HRQoL. With 96.27% of patients not reporting any AEs, this suggests that CBMPs are generally well‐tolerated,” the author wrote
Treatment-resistant epilepsy affects approximately one-third of people with epilepsy, who continue to experience seizures despite being prescribed the most suitable conventional medication. Previous studies have shown that CBD can have a beneficial effect on limiting the number of seizures those with TRE experience. This prompted researchers to investigate whether treatment could be enhanced by using broad-spectrum cannabis medicines containing THC and other compounds alongside CBD.
“Epidyolex, a CBD oil isolate, is licensed as an adjunctive medication for TRE secondary to Dravet syndrome, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, and tuberous sclerosis complex. A meta‐analysis of four large randomized controlled trials demonstrated a significant decrease in seizure frequency compared to placebo in patients treated with CBD. A recent meta‐analysis also found CBD increased the number of individuals reporting a ≥ 50% reduction in seizure frequency by 20%,” the study reports.
The researchers acknowledged limitations in their study, including the small cohort size and reliance on self-reported data from patients already familiar with cannabis. The majority of participants (67.16%) were already cannabis users prior to the study.
Despite these limitations, the findings provide encouraging data supporting the potential use of cannabis as a treatment option for TRE patients who have not responded to conventional medications.
“Treatment with CBMPs was associated with an improvement in both epilepsy‐specific and general HRQoL outcomes at one, three, and six months,” study authors said in their conclusion. “This study shows the promising potential of CBMPs as an adjunctive treatment option in the management of TRE. However, this study has its own limitations and as a result it is hard to deduce causality and as such future randomized control trials are needed to fully evaluate the viability of broad‐spectrum CBMPs in TRE.”
