Children in New South Wales, a state within Australia, with the worst cases of epilepsy will be the first children in the country to receive a cannabis-based treatment. Most children are completely drug resistant. The Government of New South Wales recently announced that they had secured the medicine from the United Kingdom for over 40 child patients. The oral drug, which is known as Epidiolex, has already been proven successful overseas. NSW Premier Mike Baird said that children in the state with a very server case of drug-resistant epilepsy now have access to the drug.
“I have spoken to some of those parents, I’ve been moved by their tears,” he said. “I just can’t imagine what it would be like to stand there, to be there, to look at your children suffering and continuing to suffer. Sometimes you can provide hope and today is one of those days.”
The 40 children that were chosen eligible for Epidiolex are under a compassionate access scheme. The scheme will be carried out outside of separate trial for medicinal cannabis. The trials will start in New South Wales later in 2016. Dr. John Lawson, for the Sydney Children’s Hospital in Randwick, noted that it was unfortunate that the drug was originally limited to a small number of children, especially because he knows how effective the treatment is. However now Lawson is optimistic about the upcoming medicinal cannabis trials and believes that the study will increase their number of patients in the future. He said that the children who were given the drug will be monitored over a period of 12 weeks.
“Hopefully, we will have hundreds involved in the next 12 months. This is not a miracle for everyone… Maybe one in 10 will have a very good response, and maybe one in three will have a good response,” said Dr. Lawson. ”But this is a group where there has been no hope.”
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