Anticonvulsants available forms

In severe malnutrition where circulating protein concentrations are very low, in uraemia and in pregnancy, the distribution of the drug (e.g., anticonvulsants) between bound and free forms may alter, and when monitoring treatment it may be necessary to get the laboratory to measure free concentrations of the drug. However this can only be done in specialised centres, even in developed countries, and is not usually available elsewhere. 

Drugs that act as agonists at this receptor are used mostly but not exclusively in sleep and anxiety disorders. Benzodiazepines (see later) have hypnotic, sedative, anxiolytic, anticonvulsant and (central) muscle relaxant actions. They form a significant but not the only part of available pharmacological treatments, as the following account will illustrate. 

For drugs with short half-lives (30 min to 3 h) and a relatively narrow margin of safety, the use of an inconveniently short dosage interval (< 6 h) would be required to maintain plasma concentrations within the therapeutic range. This situation applies to carbamazepine and valproic acid (anticonvulsants), which are commercially available as conventional oral dosage forms. For drugs with a... 

ABSTRACT This review summarizes the literature on anticonvulsant activities of 334 medicinal plants used for the treatment of epilepsy and convulsive disorders in the indigenous system of medicine. Data on plants which have not yet been investigated for pharmacological activity are also presented. The details are presented in a tabular form. The data includes the plant part involved, the nature of the extract or fraction used and the names of active compounds and their structures wherever available. The terms used in ancient texts for various types of convulsive disorders are retained. The results of anticonvulsant activities of extracts, fractions and pure compounds isolated from the plants on various bioassays are also presented. 

The benzodiazepines form a group of over 40 substances, approximately half of which are available in Germany in proprietary medicines. All benzodiazepines have anticonvulsant, anxiolytic, muscle-relaxant and sedative/hypnotic properties, although the various substances differ from each other with respect to the strengths of these effects. Most substances are available as tranquilizers/ hypnotics and some as anticonvulsants or muscle relaxants. A habit-forming potential is common to all benzodiazepines, and a small number of these substances are abused extremely frequently. These are discussed further below. 

In separate reports Livingston and coworkers have reported clinical studies with sulthiame(VII) and carbamazepine (VIII) Both drugs are commercially available in Europe and currently under investigation in several centers in the U. S. Sulthiame is reported to possess particularly significant anticonvulsant properties against major motor and psychomotor seizures, while carbamazepine was most useful in the latter form of epilepsy. 

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