What is Epilepsy?
Epilepsy refers to a group of chronic neurological disorders in which clusters of nerve cells in the brain sometimes signal abnormally, triggering an epileptic seizure. Depending on the type of seizure, they can vary from mild to severe and cause brief changes in a person's awareness, body movements, emotions or senses, such as taste, smell, vision or hearing. Epilepsy can usually be controlled, but not cured, with medicine, and a person is only diagnosed with the disorder after two of more unprovoked seizures.
Have you been experiencing
recurring seizures?
You could qualify for in checks for treatment
No
Symptoms and Types of Seizures
Seizures are the most visible symptom of epilepsy and are classified as either partial or generalized depending on how the abnormal brain activity begins. While most people tend to have the same type of recurring seizure, others experience different types with different symptoms each time. Seizures can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes and end when a person’s brain activity returns to normal.
Partial Seizures begin in a specific area of the brain and vary slightly in symptoms. In some cases a seizure will begin in one part of the brain and spread throughout the rest of the brain.
Simple Partial Seizures: They may alter emotions or change the way things look, smell, feel, taste or sound, but don’t result in loss of consciousness.
Complex Partial Seizures: These alter consciousness, causing a person to lose awareness for a period of time, resulting in staring, hand rubbing, lip smacking, arm positioning, vocalization or swallowing.
Generalized Seizures begin over the entire surface of the brain and range from mild to severe.
Absence Seizures (petit mal): These seizures are characterized by staring, subtle body movement and brief lapses of awareness.
Myoclonic seizures: These seizures usually appear as sudden jerks of the arms and legs.
Atonic seizures: Also known as drop attacks, these seizures cause a person to suddenly collapse or fall down.
Tonic-clonic seizures (grand mal): The most intense type of seizures, these include a loss of consciousness, body stiffening and shaking, and sometimes tongue biting or loss of bladder control.
Causes
Doctors still don’t know what causes epilepsy, but the condition can often be traced to an accident, brain tumor, brain infection or stroke. Several types of epilepsy have been linked to defective genes that regulate how brain cells communicate with each other, but only a few rare types are known to come from specific gene defects. Some types of epilepsy may run in families, but generic inheritance is only thought to play a partial role in the development of the disorder.
Who is affected by Epilepsy?
According to statistics, about 40 million people worldwide have epilepsy, with around 2 million living in the U.S. Epilepsy is most common during childhood and after age 65, but the disorder can occur at any age and is slightly more common in men than women.
Treatment
Currently there is no cure for epilepsy, but in most cases, a single anti-epileptic drug can stop seizures or at least reduce their frequency and intensity. Many adults can discontinue medication after two or more years without seizures, and over half the children with medication-controlled epilepsy will never have another seizure after stopping medication. In more severe cases, a doctor may suggest surgery to remove the damaged brain tissue causing the seizures, a ketogenic diet, which includes more fat and less carbohydrates, or a vagus nerve stimulator to send weak signals to the vagus nerve and brain to help control seizures.