Anti-Seizure Drugs May Raise Alzheimer Risk

The use of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) may be associated with an increased risk of incident dementia and Alzheimer disease (AD) in older individuals, according to a new study. This association was especially prominent in AEDs with known cognitive adverse effects (CAEs).

For their study, the researchers evaluated data from Finnish public health registers and German health insurance data on individuals with dementia of any type (German data n = 20,325) and AD (Finnish data n = 70,718). Each person with dementia or AD was matched with up to 4 controls without dementia.
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The researchers included a lag time of 2 years between AED use and dementia in order to take potential protopathic bias into account. Conditional logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (ORs).

Individuals with dementia were found to use AEDs more frequently than controls, and AED use was found to be associated with a significantly greater risk of incident dementia (adjusted OR 1.28) and AD (adjusted OR 1.15) compared with no AED use.

The researchers noted that higher AED exposure was associated with greater risk of dementia and AD. They also found that AEDs with known CAEs were tied to a higher risk of dementia compared with AEDs with no known CAEs (dementia OR 1.59; AD OR 1.19).

—Christina Vogt

Reference:

Tailpale H, Gomm W, Broich K, et al. Use of antiepileptic drugs and dementia risk- an analysis of Finnish health register and German health insurance data [Published online March 22, 2018]. J Am Geriatr Soc. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.15358