Carbamazepine versus phenytoin monotherapy for epilepsy: an individual participant data review.

CONCLUSIONS: We have not found evidence for a statistically significant difference between carbamazepine and phenytoin for the efficacy outcomes examined in this review, but CIs are wide and we cannot exclude the possibility of important differences. There is no evidence in this review that phenytoin is more strongly associated with serious adverse events than carbamazepine. There is some evidence that people with generalised seizures may be less likely to withdraw early from phenytoin than from carbamazepine, but misclassification of seizure type may have impacted upon our results. We recommend caution when interpreting the results of this review, and do not recommend that our results alone should be used in choosing between carbamazepine and phenytoin. We recommend that future trials should be designed to the highest quality possible, with considerations of allocation concealment and masking, choice of population, choice of outcomes and analysis, and presentation of results. PMID: 28240353 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Cochrane Database Syst Rev Source Type: research