Recognizing And Dealing With Seizure Warning Signs

Seizures are related to many different conditions, such as epilepsy, and there are many triggers and warning signs associated with them that you can watch for. These seizure warning signs include behaviors, physical signs, environmental factors and much more. In addition, people often experience individual warning signs prior to seizures occurring, such as a specific smell or taste.

Identifying common seizure warning signs as well as recognizing personal triggers can help prevent seizures as well as help you and others around you manage them better. Seizures can be mild or severe, and grand mal seizures are the most severe. Sometimes these seizures can have behavioral issues that are triggers even several hours prior to the seizure occurring. This can be very helpful when it comes to preventing seizures. In this case, the doctor should be contacted to see if perhaps an immediate extra dose of the medication could help. 

When the trigger is a certain smell that occurs, sometimes this can be offset by having the person who is about to experience the seizure sniff garlic or another really strong odor. Another type of seizure is called the Jacksonian seizure, and the attack can sometimes be stopped in the process by having someone massage the twitching muscles.

A person should avoid alcohol if they are prone to having seizures. If your seizures are a common occurrence, you need to definitely learn from them so that you can identify personal triggers, which will help yourself try to get them under control. A seizure is the result of an excessive amount of activity in the brain. While many conditions and situations aren't completely curable, with the right medication and awareness about lifestyle and warning triggers and signs, seizures can be manageable to an extent.

The areas of the brain affected often determine the types of seizures and the behaviors during them. Simple seizures are episodes where the patient is left conscious, but complex seizures are episodes where the person often loses consciousness. Experiencing warning signs in relation to grand mal seizures hours before was discussed in an earlier paragraph. Did you know that in some cases the warning signs can happen even days before the attack? And, sometimes there is absolutely no warning when a seizure occurs. However, knowing the many seizure warning signs is going to give you the best chance to help you manage and possibly overcome your condition.

How To Differentiate Psychological Seizures From Epileptic Ones

Psychological seizures or non-epileptic attack disorders are very similar to epileptic seizures, therefore they are often misdiagnosed and treated with the wrong drugs. There are estimations that show 20% of seizure patients diagnosed with epilepsy don't respond to the treatment given to them by their doctors, the reason being that they don't suffer from epilepsy in the first place.

There are some physical clues which can help specialist tell psychological seizures from epilepsy ones, but sometimes these clues can be misleading. One of the most relevant is the eye movements during the seizure. A study done by the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona revealed that almost all patients who had a non-epileptic seizure had their eyes closed during the event, while almost all those who suffered epileptic seizures either had their eyes opened or blinked during the whole time. These findings are interesting, but they still need to be confirmed. Being able to differentiate early between the two types of seizures is very important, as it could prevent many failed treatments caused by the fact that patients receive drugs for a condition they don't actually suffer from.

The main difference between psychological seizures and epileptic ones is the absence of the electrical discharges in the brain that are characteristic for epilepsy sufferers. The differential diagnosis starts by ruling out epilepsy, migraine, stroke, vertigo or syncope as possible causes of the seizures.

The best method to rule out epilepsy is to record the electrical signals in the brain. This is done with a video-electroencephalogram, also known as EEG. Sensors are place don the patient's scalp, then their EEG is recorded while they are also videotaped. This test is usually done over a period of several days, in order to allow time for the seizures to occur. It is important that the patient is also recorded on video, because the EEG test can give lots of false positives in both the general population and in patients suffering from other psychiatric disorders that are characterized by seizures similar to psychological ones such as panic disorders or schizophrenia.

Although highly relevant, many times this test is skipped by neurologists, who directly put their patients on epilepsy drugs. If a patient doesn't respond to a certain drug, the specialists then tries different drugs, but none of them is successful in the end, since the patient doesn't suffer from epilepsy.