Medical Treatment of Cysticercosis--Ineffective

Abstract

The firststudies on specific drug therapy for neurocysticercosis (NCC) appeared more than one decade ago. 1-5 As usually occurs with pioneer work with many other drugs, such studies only included anecdotal case reports or small series of patients with different forms of the disease. Therefore, the efficacy of anticysticercal drugs was difficult to evaluate. A new age of knowledge on medical treatment for NCC began when Sotelo and coworkers 6,7 published the first controlled trials of praziquantel therapy in patients with parenchymal brain cysts. The authors used historical controls to demonstrate that viable cysticerci may live unchanged for several years within the brain parenchyma and that a course with praziquantel at daily doses of 50 mg per kilogram of body weight for 15 days destroys more than 60% of these cysts in less than 3 months. Using a similar design, several articles from different areas of the world further