Seizures - Symptoms and causes (2023)

FAQs

What 3 things can cause seizures? ›

Missed medication, lack of sleep, stress, alcohol, and menstruation are some of the most common triggers, but there are many more. Flashing lights can cause seizures in some people, but it's much less frequent than you might imagine.

Anything that interrupts the normal connections between nerve cells in the brain can cause a seizure. This includes a high fever, high or low blood sugar, alcohol or drug withdrawal, or a brain concussion. But when a person has 2 or more seizures with no known cause, this is diagnosed as epilepsy.

Stress and anxiety can cause the physical symptoms of a seizure that are not caused by abnormal changes in the electrical activity of the brain. These seizures are known as Non-Epileptic Seizures (NES). Stress is also a trigger for people who have been diagnosed with epilepsy.

Emotional stress also can lead to seizures. Emotional stress is usually related to a situation or event that has personal meaning to you. It may be a situation in which you feel a loss of control. In particular, the kind of emotional stress that leads to most seizures is worry or fear.

An aura or warning is the first symptom of a seizure and is considered part of the seizure. Often the aura is an indescribable feeling. Other times it's easy to recognize and may be a change in feeling, sensation, thought, or behavior that is similar each time a seizure occurs.

A seizure is a medical condition where you have a temporary, unstoppable surge of electrical activity in your brain. When that happens, the affected brain cells uncontrollably fire signals to others around them. This kind of electrical activity overloads the affected areas of your brain.

Often, before experiencing a seizure, someone may experience an “aura.” Auras may cause sensations of strange tastes and smells, nausea, anxiety, or a fluttering feeling, and they can serve as a warning for someone who has endured many previous seizures.

The temporal lobes are the areas of the brain that most commonly give rise to seizures. The mesial portion (middle) of both temporal lobes is very important in epilepsy — it is frequently the source of seizures and can be prone to damage or scarring.

The only vitamin deficiency known to cause or worsen seizures is a deficiency of vitamin B6 (pyridoxine). This deficiency occurs mainly in newborns and infants and causes seizures that are hard to control.

Although scientists and clinicians have long known that prolonged seizures, a condition referred to as "status epilepticus," kill brain cells, surprisingly little scientific evidence exists to support the notion that individual seizures do damage.

How do you stop a seizure from happening? ›

Seizures can result from severe imbalances in electrolytes due to dehydration. Dehydration can reduce the amount of blood in the body, which can put strain on the heart and cause shock. Shock is a dangerous decrease in blood pressure, which can be fatal.

In epilepsy the brain's electrical rhythms have a tendency to become imbalanced, resulting in recurrent seizures. In patients with seizures, the normal electrical pattern is disrupted by sudden and synchronized bursts of electrical energy that may briefly affect their consciousness, movements or sensations.

PNES are attacks that may look like epileptic seizures but are not epileptic and instead are cause by psychological factors. Sometimes a specific traumatic event can be identified. PNES are sometimes referred to as psychogenic events, psychological events, or nonepileptic seizures (NES).

Stress can cause seizures known as psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES). PNES differ from neurological seizures with causes such as epilepsy. Learn about stress's relationship to PNES, panic attacks, and more. For most people, feelings of stress are short-lived.

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is the diagnostic tool that identifies structural changes in the brain that may cause seizures or be associated with epilepsy.

Panic attacks can cause sweating, palpitations (being able to feel your heartbeat), trembling and difficulty breathing. The person may also lose consciousness and shake. Factitious seizures means that the person has some level of conscious control over them.

It's possible for an adult without a history of epilepsy to experience a seizure. Potential causes include central nervous system infections, brain tumors, stroke, and brain injuries. The use or stopping of certain substances, including alcohol, may also trigger a seizure. The type of seizure depends on the cause.

Tests for diagnosing seizures

If this is your first seizure, your doctor may want to do some scans to look at the structures in your brain. A common form of imaging is MRI. Your doctor may also want to assess how the naturally occurring activity in your brain is functioning. To do this, an EEG is performed.

What it feels like right before a seizure? ›

Before a seizure, you might have warning signs like a headache or tingling. After the seizure, you may feel confused, tired, or sore. Read on to learn about how having different types of seizures might feel.

Some people with seizures have noticed an aura or unusual sensation that serves as a warning signal before a seizure begins. This can come in the form of a visual disturbance, sound, or feeling of anxiety. Auras are sometimes a type of focal, or petit mal, seizure, and can be followed by a grand mal seizure.

The consequences of epilepsy can be quite severe and include shortened lifespan, excessive bodily injury, neuropsychological and psychiatric impairment, and social disability. There is evidence that seizures cause brain injury, including neuronal death and physiological dysfunction.

While it's true that many people come round from a seizure fairly quickly and become aware of their surroundings, full recovery can take some time. Even if the person has not sustained an injury, it can take several hours, sometimes several days, before a person feels back to normal again.

Do not hold the person down or try to stop his or her movements. Do not put anything in the person's mouth. This can injure teeth or the jaw. A person having a seizure cannot swallow his or her tongue.

According to 2014 research, almost two-thirds of seizures occur between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. It's estimated that, in people with seizures: about 20 percent experience seizures during sleep. about 41 percent experience seizures during the day. about 39 percent experience seizures during the day and night.

Any type of epileptic seizure could potentially affect your memory, either during or after a seizure. If you have lots of seizures, memory problems might happen more often. Some people have generalised seizures that affect all of the brain.

Seizures and epilepsy are more common in young children and older people. About 1 in 100 people in the U.S. has had a single unprovoked seizure or has been diagnosed with epilepsy. 1 in 26 people will develop epilepsy in their lifetime. People with certain conditions may be at greater risk.

While vitamin D deficiency in children usually presents as rickets, when severe such deficiency may result in hypocalcaemic seizures.

Stimulants such as tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, sweets, soft drinks, excess salt, spices and animal proteins may trigger seizures by suddenly changing the body's metabolism. Some parents have reported that allergic reactions to certain foods (e.g. white flour) also seem to trigger seizures in their children.

Can low potassium cause a seizure? ›

Unlike other electrolyte alterations, hypokalemia or hyperkalemia rarely causes symptoms in the CNS, and seizures do not occur (8). The majority of patients with mild hypokalemia (3.0 - 3.5 mmol/L) are asymptomatic and initial symptoms, when they occur, may be non-specific such as weakness or fatigue (11).

The incidence of mental retardation among those with epilepsy is between 20 and 29 percent, as compared to 1 to 2 percent of the general population. Epilepsy may also affect speech and language, attention, memory, and executive functioning.

People with epilepsy develop Alzheimer's disease at a rate 6 times higher than the non-epileptic population, and seizures can damage the memory centers of the brain and contribute to dementia.

Call 911 or seek emergency medical help for seizures if: A seizure lasts more than five minutes. Someone experiences a seizure for the first time. Person remains unconsciousness after a seizure ends.

The names of benzodiazepines that are most commonly used as rescue medications include diazepam, lorazepam, clonazepam, and midazolam. The availability of these medicines in different forms and how they are used may vary from country to country.

cushion their head if they're on the ground. loosen any tight clothing around their neck, such as a collar or tie, to aid breathing. turn them on to their side after their convulsions stop – read more about the recovery position. stay with them and talk to them calmly until they recover.

Keep your fluids topped up all the time. Dehydration can make it more likely for you to have a seizure. This is particularly important when you are exercising.

Yes, it can. Seizures are very sensitive to sleep patterns. Some people have their first and only seizures after an "all-nighter" at college or after not sleeping well for long periods. If you have epilepsy, lack of "good sleep" makes most people more likely to have seizures.

Can the brain recover after a seizure? ›

Some people recover immediately while others may take minutes to hours to feel like their usual self. The type of seizure, as well as what part of the brain the seizure impacts, affects the recovery period – how long it may last and what may occur during it.

Tonic and clonic seizures can start on one side of the brain (partial or focal seizures), or on both sides of the brain simultaneously (generalized). Tonic and clonic seizure activity can happen in the same seizure. A tonic-clonic seizure is the modern term for a grand mal seizure.

For example, if you have a mild seizure, you may stay conscious. You might also feel strange and experience tingling, anxiety, or déjà vu. If you lose consciousness during a seizure, you won't feel anything as it happens. But you might wake up feeling confused, tired, sore, or scared.

Seizures, particularly repetitive seizures, cause substantial brain damage in highly susceptible areas, such as parts of the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, amygdala, thalamus and other limbic structures; however, neuronal death after seizures can be more widespread and is generally quite variable (e.g., [24, 77]).