[Therapeutic and pharmacological monitoring of individual monotherapy of epilepsy with hexamidine]. / Terapevticheskii i farmakologicheskii monitoring pri individualizatsii monoterapii geksamidinom bol'nykh épilepsiei.

ABSTRACT

The treatment with primidone alone of 53 epileptic patients with generalized tonic-clonic seizures, partial attacks with elementary symptomatology, and partial fits with complex symptomatology removed them completely in 75, 64.2, and 36.9% of the patients, respectively. The number of attacks was decreased as a result by 50% and over in 90, 78.6, and 73.7% of the patients, respectively. The attainment of such high efficacy of the monotherapy (called by the author intensive in contrast to routine or inadequate therapy carried out, as a rule, in standard doses) appeared possible only under the conditions of individualization of the drug doses which ranged within 250-2500 mg/day. The concentration of phenobarbital, the main end metabolite of primidone, in the blood serum of patients, in whom the attacks were completely arrested and who developed no clinical side effects with no toxic action on the internal organs, ranged from 14 to 59.1 mg/l. In partial fits with complex symptomatology, primidone appeared least effective for those types of fits in the treatment of which it was viewed as most adequate.