On the possible chemical similarity of some common antiepileptic drugs

Epilepsy is a disease that affects approximately 50 million people in developing countries. Though the exact mechanism has not been yet discovered, it should be said that some light has been shed on its cellular and network mechanisms. As a cause of this there are several drugs that manage to stop seizures happening, however they do not cure epilepsy. Furthermore, most of these drugs are known to cause serious side effects (i.e. birth defects when the therapy occurs during pregnancy). In the present study we are aiming on a classification of 31 of the available drugs by studying their chemical similarity. For this reason we apply a rigorous approach based on tools from mathematical analysis: in particular the metric space approach.