Epilepsy drug exposure in womb linked to significantly poorer school test results

Epilepsy research using the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank has found that exposure to epilepsy drugs in the womb is linked to significantly poorer school test results among seven year olds.

Swansea University researcher Arron Lacey and the team studied mothers that had epilepsy, recorded the type of epilepsy drug that they were prescribed during pregnancy and analysed their children’s school test results as part of the study, published online in the BMJ Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Routinely collected healthcare information from SAIL Databank and national school test data at Key Stage 1 was used to compare the academic performance of seven year olds in Wales born to mothers with epilepsy to the matched control group.

Arron said: “In utero exposure to antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) in combination, or sodium valproate alone, is associated with a significant decrease in attainment in national educational tests for 7-year-old children compared with both a matched control group and the all-Wales national average.

These results give further support to the cognitive and developmental effects of in utero exposure to sodium valproate as well as multiple AEDs, which should be balanced against the need for effective seizure control for women during pregnancy.”

Arron is part of the Prudent Healthcare Research Team and the Swansea Neurology Research Group which includes SAIL analysts, clinicians and academics. They conduct research using the SAIL databank as well as analysing unstructured text in medical records.

The team have already published several population-based studies exploring the effects of epilepsy on social deprivation and the effects of epilepsy drugs, as well as prescribing trends in epilepsy and are using natural language processing (NLP) to extract clinical data from clinic letters for epilepsy research.

First published: @ResearchWales Issue 4, June 2018