Clinical Effectiveness and Safety of Midazolam Compared With Lorazepam for Control of Seizures in Adults

Key Messages

What Is the Issue?

• The emergency treatment of prolonged seizures or status epilepticus is required to be rapid and efficient to prevent permanent brain damage or death.
• Benzodiazepines, such as midazolam, lorazepam, diazepam, and clonazepam, are established as first-line treatment medications for acute treatments of seizures.
• Various administration routes of delivery for these drugs have become available, but the comparative clinical effectiveness and safety among administration routes are still unclear.
• Decision-makers are interested in whether the current use of intramuscular (IM) midazolam for treatment of seizures by paramedics in a prehospital environment can be switched to IV lorazepam as normally used by nurses and physicians in clinic settings.

What Did We Do?

• We identified and summarized the literature on the evidence of the clinical effectiveness and safety of midazolam compared to lorazepam in adults to control seizures.
• We searched key resources, including journal citation databases, and conducted a focused internet search for relevant evidence published since 2019. One reviewer screened citations for inclusion based on predefined criteria, critically appraised the included studies, and narratively summarized the findings.

What Did We Find?

• We identified 1 systematic review (SR) that included 4 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), only 1 was relevant to this review. This double-blind RCT determined the efficacy of IM midazolam as noninferior to IV lorazepam for treatment of seizures by paramedics in a mixed population of adults (89%) and children (11%).
• The authors of the SR conducted a subanalysis of a dataset of participant-level data and showed that IM midazolam was as effective and safe as IV lorazepam in adult patients for prehospital seizure cessation. The findings of the adult population were similar to those of the whole randomized population of both adults and children.

What Does This Mean?

• With the shorter time required to administration of midazolam by the IM route compared to administration of lorazepam by the IV route, and the comparable efficacy and safety between the 2 active treatments, the use of IM midazolam may be a better option in the prehospital environment when IV access in patients with seizures is not readily established.
• Switching of IM midazolam to IV lorazepam for treatment of seizures by paramedics may not be practical.