A Continuing Commitment

The Epilepsy Foundation’s new Anticonvulsants and Women: Call to Action campaign is part of an ongoing commitment to identify and publicize epilepsy-related issues that affect women’s health. It began in the mid 1990s with a Women and Epilepsy Initiative to educate women with epilepsy and their physicians about emerging links between seizures and the menstrual cycle and other interrelationships between the condition and women’s reproductive health. The Initiative became a major educational campaign marked by conferences, media messages, printed educational materials, and online expert series.

The 2005 campaign includes women who are taking anticonvulsants for conditions other than epilepsy, with a special focus on new information about the relative risks of birth defects from these medications. In the spring of 2004, the Epilepsy Foundation and the American Epilepsy Society, with support from GlaxoSmithKline, sponsored a meeting in New York of representatives from five international pregnancy registries. That meeting produced a commitment by the registries to expedite publication of their results, a commitment that has since produced the series of reports providing new information on relative risks.

Based on these results, the Epilepsy Foundation, joined once more by the American Epilepsy Society, a professional organization of scientists and clinicians, sponsored a scientific forum and media teleconference briefing with experts on the latest studies and emerging trends from the registries. Both events took place at the annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society in December, 2004.

The Foundation’s new Call to Action constitutes the next step in its efforts to reach women, to make them aware of what is being learned about their medications and to help them make informed decisions about their care.