When contemplating polypharmacy for a patient
with epilepsy, it is important to consider the concept
of “total drug load” in addition to the number of drugs
being prescribed. Although general agreement on the
definition has not been reached, drug load is usually
defined as the total amount of drug exposure for a
treatment regimen, and has been quantified as the pre-scribed daily dose of AED(s) divided by the defined
daily dose for the AED(s) as outlined by the World
correlate with the number of adverse events better
than the number of AEDs being prescribed.