Health News » Epilepsy http://topdrug.net Information on popular complementary and alternative medical topics Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:27:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 HOW WE DIAGNOSE A SEIZURE AND DECIDE WHAT IT WILL MEAN FOR YOUR CHILD http://topdrug.net/2011/02/how-we-diagnose-a-seizure-and-decide-what-it-will-mean-for-your-child http://topdrug.net/2011/02/how-we-diagnose-a-seizure-and-decide-what-it-will-mean-for-your-child#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:52:51 +0000 admin http://topdrug.net/?p=169 A seizure, as we have seen, is a sudden alteration in behavior or in motor function caused by an electrical discharge from the brain.
It should be very easy to diagnose a seizure since it is simply a sudden change in behavior or motor function. But sometimes it’s not that simple; people have sudden changes in behavior all the time. Sometimes children faint, daydream, or fall down. How do you tell if those events were seizures? The only way to diagnose a seizure is to take a very careful history of the event that has occurred.
That’s why doctors ask all those questions. What was the child doing when it happened? What was the first thing that was noticed? What happened next? What was the child doing during the episode? The doctor may ask you to demonstrate what you saw (if you saw it). Was the child trembling, making rapid movements of the arms or legs, or were the child’s arms or legs jerking rhythmically? What was the child like afterward? Was she tired? Was there a headache? Did the child wet herself during the spell? While none of these findings is specific for a seizure, the pattern may make the physician more or less suspicious that the episode was a seizure.
There is no diagnostic test for a seizure or for epilepsy. The diagnosis rests solely on the physician’s interpretation of the history of the episode which occurred.
Since physicians rarely have the opportunity to see the seizure events for themselves, they must depend on the observation of parents or other
witnesses to the episode. Most of these observers have never seen a true seizure and are upset and panicked by what they have seen. When they relay the information through third parties, the story can grow more lurid or lose important details. Frequently events occur at school or when the child is with friends. The person who actually saw the “seizure” will give more useful responses if he or she is calmly questioned about exactly what happened to your child. This is one of the reasons why you are such an important member of the team. The physician can’t make a diagnosis without good information. You may need to talk to teachers, friends, or even other children who saw what happened.
Let us give you an example of how difficult it may be to determine whether a particular episode was a seizure and how we think about the episode’s importance for the child’s future.
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]]> http://topdrug.net/2011/02/how-we-diagnose-a-seizure-and-decide-what-it-will-mean-for-your-child/feed 0 HOW COMMON ARE THE INDIVIDUAL CAUSES OF EPILEPSY? http://topdrug.net/2009/04/how-common-are-the-individual-causes-of-epilepsy http://topdrug.net/2009/04/how-common-are-the-individual-causes-of-epilepsy#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:31:43 +0000 admin http://topdrug.net/2009/04/how-common-are-the-individual-causes-of-epilepsy Causes of epilepsy that could be defined, with a fair degree of confidence, in each of two studies. The way in which the subjects were selected was different in each study, but the final

figure—the proportion in which a cause for epilepsy could be defined—varied within narrow limits, between only 34.5 per cent and 39.0 per cent.

The fact that 61.0-65.5 per cent of people with epilepsy have no discernible cause for their seizures certainly does not mean that the remainder have ‘idiopathic’ epilepsy. Since the advent of magnetic resonance imaging we know that a large proportion of subjects with such ‘cryptogenic’ epilepsy (epilepsy of hidden cause), have minor structural changes in the

brain—very commonly zones of atrophy in one or other temporal lobe. More recent studies show that nearly 90 per cent of those with temporal lobe epilepsy, for example, will have abnormalities on magnetic resonance imaging, though these abnormalities may be very minor, and only detectable with careful measurements on the scan.

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