A task force to create international epilepsy guidelines for physicians and researchers has been recently established, with the goal of bringing together best practices from around the world that address issues related to epilepsy treatment and research.

The International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) Task Force on Guidelines in Epilepsy was set up to encourage experts from around the world to work together to discover each others’ best epilepsy guidelines related to diagnosis, testing, medications, imaging, surgery and many other topics.

The ILAE website describes the organization as “the world’s preeminent association of physicians and other health professionals working toward a world where no persons’ life is limited by epilepsy.”

One purpose of the task force is to mitigate the amount of time and resources spent generating different guidelines around the world that essentially come to the same conclusions, explains Dr. Nathalie Jette, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Calgary and the task force’s co-chair.

The task force also wants to develop ways to ensure best practices related to epilepsy treatment and research reach as many clinicians and researchers as possible — having so many countries with their own guidelines creates a stumbling block in this respect, says Jette.

Often, she says, guidelines will be published and those clinicians who have a special interest in epilepsy will read and implement the recommended practices, but the guidelines don’t reach as many physicians who are treating people with epilepsy as they should.

To date, the task force has been performing a systematic review to identify the most effective published epilepsy guidelines from around the world from almost 7,000 documents.

The task force is aiming to examine all the documents by the end of December and complete the data abstraction by the end of March.

“Then, we will be coming up with recommendations and deciding where we will go from there,” says Jette.

Jette explains the best possible long-term result from international epilepsy guidelines:

“If there are some guidelines which can be effectively implemented, then it should decrease disparities in care, it should decrease the treatment gap and it should improve outcomes for people with epilepsy,” she says.

An established set of international epilepsy best practices also fills a gap in Canada, where there is no Canadian-specific set of epilepsy guidelines, says Jette.

Canadian practitioners and researchers are currently using other guidelines from the American Epilepsy Society, the American Academy of Neurology and the ILAE.

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Writer: Deron Hamel