Yo, what’s good? My name is Dan and I got some dope news for ya. The UMC Utrecht Brain Center, in collab with various organizations in the Netherlands, just scored $1.5 million from the Dutch government for a lit study. Bedrocan dropped the announcement on March 20th. It’s been shown that CBD can cut seizures in kids with epilepsy-related syndromes, and now researchers are about to dive deep into it.
According to Cannabis Health News from the UK, via the government’s or ZonMW’s Good Use of Medicines program, researchers are gonna use this money to launch a four-year research project. They’ll be exploring the effects of high-CBD oil in children dealing with severe epilepsy.
These researchers are gonna give whole-plant high-CBD oil, Bedrolite from the Dutch Transvaal pharmacy, which is made using cannabis produced by Bedrocan, to fifty participants. The trial is set to start in the summer and the first patients are supposed to begin treatment by year end.
The goal is to see if the oil can help decrease the frequency of seizures. Researchers will also look at other quality of life markers like seizure length, sleep, and alertness. Patients gotta be new to CBD oil for treating epilepsy and/or seizures and have a minimum of eight seizures or more every four weeks to participate.
Lead researcher, Floor Jansen, who is a pediatric neurologist, says “Our research focuses on the individual. Instead of looking at a group, we look at whether the drug is effective per patient. We want to investigate whether the number of attacks decreases, but we also pay attention to other important outcomes for a patient. Think of less use of emergency medication against prolonged attacks, a change in alertness or a better night’s sleep.”
Rare, intractable forms of epilepsy are not well-studied. But here’s the dope part, researchers are gonna look at individual cases instead of looking at a group as a whole to determine whether the drug is effective for each patient.
And that’s not all, my homies. There’s a charity called Intractable Epilepsy that helps families pay for private cannabis prescriptions. Jo Griffiths, chair of Intractable Epilepsy, wants the UK to match the contribution for randomized control trials (RCTs) on Bedrocan products.
“Intractable Epilepsy supports families with private medicinal cannabis costs, once it has been prescribed for at least six months,” Griffiths said. “But some families cannot even afford a private consultation. To help every child and young adult with intractable epilepsy access full-extract medicinal cannabis, the government and health providers are saying gold standard RCTs are needed. Therefore, we are calling on the U.K. government to match the Dutch government’s €1.4 million towards trials, and to run an NHS trial using the same oils.”
She goes on to say that “The NHS has prescribed the very same oils to two children in the U.K. over the past four years, while others pay privately and some families are looking to the unregulated black market.”
Intractable Epilepsy is also looking for an observational study to examine the effects of whole-plant cannabis oils on people who have already found success with the compound. “It would be prudent of the government and the NHS to take part in these trials to build the evidence base that over 50 children have proven over the last four years,” Griffiths added.
The study is set to launch this summer and researchers will start treating patients by the end of 2023. This research could lead to some serious breakthroughs in helping kids dealing with epilepsy. Stay tuned for more updates, my peeps.