Lamotrigine and Cardiac Arrhythmias
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: While lamotrigine is an effective, well-tolerated antiseizure medication (ASM), a recent warning raised the possibility of ventricular arrhythmias. We compared arrhythmia incidence between patients newly treated for seizures with lamotrigine and those with levetiracetam (presumed cardiac-inert control). METHODS: We included patients whose first ASM prescription fill was after the first seizure or epilepsy ICD code in the study period, with no ASM in the previous year. We conducted retrospective cohort studies to emulate a target trial using 2 datasets: (1) 2009-2018 Medicare claims (United States) and (2) Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), a population-based cohort (United Kingdom). We examined cumulative incidence curves for ventricular tachycardia or fibrillation (VT/VF) from Cox proportional hazard models. RESULTS: We included 40,554 patients (lamotrigine: 3,038; levetiracetam: 37,516) from Medicare and 13,098 (lamotrigine: 8,694; levetiracetam: 4,404) from CPRD. In Medicare, the median (interquartile range) age was 61 (44-74) years and 60% were female in the lamotrigine group vs 74 (65-82) years and 57% female in the levetiracetam group. In CPRD, the median (interquartile range) age was 34 (23-53) years and 63% were female in the lamotrigine group vs 48 (29-66) years and 50% female in the levetiracetam group. After adjusting for demographics, comorbidities, and medication use, the hazard ratio for VT/VF comparing patients whose first ASM was lamotrigine vs levetiracetam was 0.73 (95% CI 0.50-1.08) for Medicare and 0.75 (95% CI 0.35-1.59) for CPRD, with a 2-year cumulative incidence of 1.7% (95% CI 1.0%-2.3%) vs 2.3% (95% CI 2.1%-2.4%) for Medicare and 0.2% (95% CI 0.1%-0.4%) vs 0.3% (95% CI 0.2%-0.6%) for CPRD. In both datasets, lamotrigine showed a slightly but nonsignificantly lower 2-year absolute difference in cumulative incidence of VT/VF compared with levetiracetam (Medicare: -0.6%, 95% CI -1.2% to 0.0%; CPRD: -0.1%, 95% CI -0.3% to 0.1%). Numerous sensitivity analyses modifying the outcome (atrial arrhythmias or any arrhythmias), censorship procedure (further censoring patients on discontinuing their initial ASM akin to a "per-protocol" analysis), or population (patients with existing cardiovascular diagnoses) found similar results. DISCUSSION: These data do not support concerns regarding lamotrigine increasing arrhythmias. Limitations include possible residual confounding and lack of generalizability to other populations. CLASSIFICATION OF EVIDENCE: This study provides Class III evidence that lamotrigine compared with levetiracetam did not significantly increase the 2-year cumulative incidence of VT/VF in adult patients with epilepsy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".