The anesthetic drug treatment of refractory and super-refractory status epilepticus around the world: Results from a global audit

Abstract

Multinational and multicenter registries collecting cases of refractory and super-refractory status epilepticus help to understand what the current practice in the treatment of such conditions is and can improve the rational therapy. We prospectively collected 776 cases of refractory status epilepticus requiring continuous intravenous anesthetic drugs in an intensive care unit setting, through online questionnaires compiled by the treating physicians in 50 countries. Initiation of an intravenous anaesthetic drug was relatively delayed in middle-income compared with high-income countries. There were marked regional differences in the choice of initial intravenous anaesthetic drug. Generally, midazolam was the most commonly used initial anesthetic drug (56%), followed by propofol (35%), in Europe, propofol was preferred over midazolam. In addition to anesthesia, 26% of cases received some form of immunosuppression (with corticosteroids and/or intravenous immunoglobulin). In this observational study, outcome was not affected by choice or sequence of anesthetic drugs, and nor was the use of barbiturate anesthetics associated with poorer outcome. The proportion of patients responding to cycles of different anaesthetic drugs was high even after failure of the earlier anesthetics, but the neurological outcome progressively worsened the longer anaesthetic drugs were needed and the longer the status epilepticus continued. However, even in the 158 patients who required three or more different anaesthetic trials, 49% had seizure control on tapering the third anesthetic, and 20% had a good neurological outcome anywhere. For these reasons we believe that it is important to persist with therapy in patients who are intractable initially, especially as etiology, not the number of duration of anesthesia, is the primary determinant of prognosis. This article is part of the Special Issue "Proceedings of the 7th London-Innsbruck Colloquium on Status Epilepticus and Acute Seizures".

Keywords: Global audit; Refractory; Registry; Status epilepticus; Super-refractory; Treatment.