The Power of Real-World Evidence with CORE-VNS

This article summarises a LivaNova-sponsored symposium entitled ‘The Power of Real-World Evidence with CORE-VNS’, delivered on 7th September 2024 as part of the 15th European Epilepsy Congress in Rome, Italy. The symposium explored real-world data from CORE-VNS, a global, prospective long-term study of patients receiving adjunctive Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) TherapyTM for drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE), which represents one of the most comprehensive contemporary real-world clinical data sets in DRE. The presentations provided an overview of the strengths, limitations, and executional requirements of large-scale real-world evidence studies in DRE. In addition, the impact of adjunctive VNS Therapy on both seizure and non-seizure outcomes in DRE within the European healthcare setting was explored. In the symposium, two speakers closely involved in the conduct of the CORE-VNS study discussed insights from the study to date. Gaia Giannicola, Clinical Senior Project Manager and Program Manager for Neuromodulation at LivaNova, Milan, Italy, described the power of real-world data in the context of the CORE-VNS study, while Arjune Sen, Consultant Neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and Professor of Global Epilepsy at University of Oxford, UK, chaired the meeting and presented an interim analysis of European patients enrolled in the CORE-VNS study.