Abstracts

Rationale: The Human Epilepsy Project (HEP) was designed to look at treatment response, biomarkers, and psychiatric comorbidities in newly treated focal epilepsy. Patients can be included if they are within 4 months of treatment initiation, regardless of prior epilepsy duration. The research team used enrollment data to explore time to treatment after seizure onset. Methods: We used the submitted medical narrative and retrospective seizure diary to assess time from first and second seizure to initiation of treatment. We used the 6^th month of the year when year of onset was known, but the month was not recorded. For cases where the day was not specified, but the month and year were recorded, we used the 15^th day. Patients who had more than 30 days delay between second seizure and initiation of treatment were considered to have delay of treatment initiation. Reason for delay, if present, was divided into 4 possible options: 1: Patient was unaware clinical events were seizures, never sought medical treatment (Patient Unaware=PU), 2: Patient sought medical treatment, but was not diagnosed with seizures (Doctor Unaware=DU), 3: Patient and/or doctor elected to delay treatment (Elective Delay, ED), or reason unknown (U). Results: Data were available for 99 of the 107 currently enrolled participants. Of these, only 49 (49.5%) met the ideal of ≤30 days between the 2^nd seizure and treatment. The mean duration between the 2^nd seizure and treatment initiation was 429.25 days, and the median was 35 days. Range was -40 to 11,009 days. 22.4% of patients had a delay of >1 year. Reason for delayed treatment was: PU: N=29, DU: N=7, ED: N=9, U: N=11. Conclusions: Initiation of treatment is often delayed after onset of focal epilepsy. The most common reason appears to be that patients do not recognize their events are seizures, although in 7.1% of patients delay was due to lack of recognition on the part of medical personnel. (Supported by The Epilepsy Study Consortium (ESCI), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the development of new therapies in epilepsy to improve patient care. The funding provided to ESCI to support HEP comes from industry, philanthropy and foundations (UCB Pharma, Finding A Cure for Epilepsy and Seizures, Pfizer, Lundbeck, The Andrews Foundation, Friends of Faces and others).