Epilepsy – clarified in 5 questions

1. What is epilepsy?

Having repeated seizures without obvious reason (unprovoked) is called epilepsy. Epilepsy is a physical disease like headache, backache and asthma. It is one of the most common brain diseases both in children and adults.

2. What are the other names for epilepsy?

Seizures, fits, jerks, seizure disorder, mirgi, apasmaram and convulsions are the other names for epilepsy. Mostly these different names are used interchangeably and denote the same with occasional minor differences.

3. What are the causes for epilepsy?

Brain is like a complex electrical jack box with billions of inter-wined wires and as many junctions between them. Brain cells communicate between one another through electrical transmissions. Normally, there is balanced and smooth electrical transmissions going on simultaneously in many parts of the brain. Seizures are caused by sudden surge of excess electrical impulses in the brain circuitry.

Many different causes can disturb the normal brain electrical function. It can be as simple as “low blood sugar” (hypoglycaemia) or traumatic brain injury during a motor vehicle accident. The tendency to have seizures in the above two examples abates once the underlying problem is corrected (normal blood sugar or healing of brain trauma) and these people have had “provoked” seizures but do not have epilepsy!

But a proportion of patients who had brain injury develop repeated seizures months or years after the injury. This is due to the scarred brain producing abnormal local electrical impulses resulting in seizures. This later condition is called epilepsy when the patient has recurrent “unprovoked” seizures. Mostly epilepsy starts during childhood and continue to adulthood in some cases. Birth time problems, brain infections, structural problems in brain formation, head injury, and genetic causes are some the common causes for seizures.

4. What are the symptoms of seizures?

The physical manifestations of seizures can be in any form such as loss of consciousness, staring and unresponsiveness, up rolling of eyes or eye blinking repeatedly, sudden falling down, stiffening or jerking of limbs, etc.

5. What are the types of epilepsy?

Epilepsies can be divided in to two broad groups, focal epilepsy and generalized epilepsy depending on whether seizures start in one particular part of the brain or simultaneously from both hemispheres, respectively. Distinguishing between focal and generalized epilepsies is very critical for diagnostic tests and treatment approaches. EEG and MRI brain are very important tests to distinguish between focal and generalized epilepsy (see here). Each person is unique. It is very important to understand epilepsy in one person is very different to that in another. So, medical advice given to one person may not be applicable to another.

For more information see here