Millions of children around the world face the daily challenges of epilepsy. While existing medications can control seizures, they often come with a heavy burden - comorbidities, related intrinsically to the disease or to the use of drugs - These comorbidities can significantly impact a child’s life, making it difficult to learn, play, and socialise. Imagine a child battling epilepsy, but also facing a different kind of fight - disease’s co-morbidities and drugs side effects.

The most common co-morbidities and side-effects encountered in the epileptic subjecs are:

These comorbidities, which affect the physical, mental, and emotional spheres, are not always adequately treated, because of the patient’s social and cultural difficulty in referring them correctly to the specialist, and in order not to incur excessive poly- pharmacology. Indeed, the management of patients with epilepsy is hampered by the pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics properties of the anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) used, and in turn by their side- effects, which can profoundly impact quality of life and treatment adherence. Therefore, especially when they do not assume a particularly severe character, comorbidities can impact significantly on the patient’s quality of life, also risking compromising the compliance to the drug and behavioural therapy.

The pharmacological management of epilepsy has reached a high level of quality, with several therapeutic options which demonstrate a high efficiency in controlling most of the clinical components of the disorder.

Despite the great impact with these pharmacological approaches, there is still an unmet need to contain the co- morbidities and side effects associated with the disease and the use of AEDs. The quest for treatments that contain the incidence of such side effects may result in excessive poly-pharmacology, which should be avoided especially in younger patients. In this context, there is a definite need for supplementation that, without interfering with the pharmacological treatment established by the specialist, helps the patient to increase compliance with the therapy itself, attenuates co-morbidities and in turn improves patients’ quality of life.

Although of considerable importance, being able to provide an effective cure for a given disease is only part of the story. The other great challenge is represented by the people’s desire to have the possibility of being completely healthy and/or to continue living a serene life following their own habits and pleasures even if under drug treatment. This aspect is usually underscored, but it represents the second face of the same coin: the desire to live one’s life properly and, in turn, not only to add years to life, but to add life to years.