J. Eric Pina-Garza, MD: Increasing the Awareness of Epilepsy

“We have to think about epilepsy as something that effects a lot of Americans, so awareness is very important.”

For J. Eric Piña-Garza, MD, the director of Pediatric Epilepsy at Centennial Children's Hospital, one of the biggest challenges in epilepsy right now is the awareness of the disease. Other conditions, such as breast cancer, garner much more traction in funding and awareness despite impacting fewer patients each year than epilepsy.

This is why the development of new drugs to address the needs of patients with epilepsy is so important to the field. In an interview with NuerologyLive, Piña-Garza spoke about the clinical development of several agents that he is keeping his eyes on, including some medications which act on steroid receptors in the brain—a new pathway to be explored in epilepsy.

Additionally, for Piña-Garza, it’s important to look into the effect of therapies that have been positive in treating partial focal seizures and see if they can make an impact in the management of other types of epilepsy, such as Dravet syndrome or Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.