Patients with epilepsy more often than healthy individual have cognitive disorders, what may be the result of different factors, among which significant place occupy the treatment with antiepileptic drugs. Topiramate is the new antiepileptic drug, which is related with high efficiency in the reduction seazures, and also whit high prevalention of cognitive adverse events. Purpose of our study is to clarify the role of depression in developing cognitive adverse events during therapy with topiramate in patients with refractory epilepsy. In the prospective stady we followed 40 adult patients with refractory epilepsy, which treatement took place on the Institute of neurology Clinical center of Serbia. All patients are neuropsychological tested twice. First time before the start of therapy with topiramate on basic antiepileptic therapy, and next time two months after the achieving of stable dose of 200mg/day. We used neuropsychological tests for evaluation attention, concentration, visual and verbal memory, speech, executive functions, divergent opinion and visual construction abilities. For estimate degree of depression we used Hamilton's scale of depression. Patients with the depressive manifestation had lower scores on cognitive tests in comparition to patients without the depression, before and after introductions topiramate. More the score of depression was larger, the scores of neuropsychological tests have been worse. Depression has bad influence on the cognitive functioning and her presence in the patients with epilepsy increases the risk from development of cognitive adverse events of topiramate.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.