20 We cannot discriminate between the relative impact of epilepsy per se, seizures or ASD therapy on cerebellar dysfunction and atrophy, but the association of cerebellar atrophy and the calculated lifetime drug load of the four most frequent ASDs (carbamazepine, diphenylhydantoin, phenobarbital, and valproate) was highly significant ( p < .001).
While there were no overall differences between the total COE group and controls over the time interval of 5 years, our results indicated that COE subjects with active epilepsy, present in 26% of the sample, were strongly associated with clinical neurologic findings and particularly MRI evident cerebellar atrophy, albeit the association did not quite reach statistical significance, possibly due to a limited sample size.