Different Types of Seizure

The causes of seizures occur when the electrical system of the brain does not function well. In this state, the brain cells of the person keep firing rather than discharging electrical impulses in a regular manner. A seizure may cause loss of consciousness and muscle contractions.

Health professionals categorize seizures into the following types:

1. Partial Seizures

A particular area of one side of the brain is affected by the electrical disorder in partial seizures. This type of seizure is further subdivided into simple partial seizures where consciousness is kept and complex partial seizures where consciousness is messed up or completely lost.

Partial seizures are the most usual form of seizure experienced by epileptics. Nearly any movement may come about as part of partial seizures as well as intense visual and auditory hallucinations.

2. Non-epileptic Seizures

These are episodes that momentarily alter an individual’s behavior and frequently appear like epileptic seizures. The affected individual may have internal sensations that bear a resemblance to those felt in an epileptic seizure.

The distinction between these two kinds of episodes is usually difficult to identify by just watching the occurrence. Even trained medical personnel still have a hard time in doing so.

3. Generalized Seizures

These affect both sides of the brain from the start of the seizure. Generalized seizures produce unconsciousness that may last for only a few minutes or for a longer period of time. These are sub-categorized into several major types:

a. Tonic clonic seizures also known as grand mal seizures: These are the most common and best known type of generalized seizures. They begin with stiffening of the limbs which is the tonic stage, followed by jerking of the extremities and face or the clonic stage.

b. Myoclonic seizures: These produce rapid, brief contractions of muscles that typically happen on both sides of the body at the same time.

Usually, people think of them as abrupt jerks or clumsiness. A comparable experience that is common to many people who do not have epilepsy is the sudden jerk of a foot when sleeping.

c. Atonics seizures bring about a sudden loss of muscle tone. This type of seizure is also called as drop attack, a static or a kinetic seizure. Individuals experiencing this seizure may have head drops, loss of bearing or unexpected collapse. Since the occurrence of this seizure doesn’t give out any warning and the individuals who experience them fall with force, an atonics seizure usually results in head injuries.

d. Absence seizures also known as petit mal seizures: They are described as lapses of attentiveness that sometimes include staring. They usually begin and end suddenly and happen for only a few seconds.

There is no forewarning as well as an after-effect. More frequent in children than in adults, absence seizures are commonly so short that they end unnoticed even if the child goes through 50 to 100 attacks in a day.

4. Status Epilepticus

Most seizures stop after just a few minutes. If they are extended or happen in a succession, there is a greater threat of status epilepticus. This type of seizure literally denotes a continuous state of seizure.

These are the various types of seizures. Most individuals may experience just one kind but some may be affected by more than one. The type of seizure someone has depends on the affected part of the brain and how much of it is disturbed by the abnormal electrical impulses that produce seizures.

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The Most Common Causes of Seizures

On the whole, seizures are caused by various conditions like illness, injury and many more health issues. These health problems may include anomalies in the veins and arteries of the brain which may be the hardening of the vessels supplying the brain with blood and oxygen, bleeding or hemorrhage, brain tumors, chromosome problems, congenital abnormalities, hypertension, stroke and ischemia.

Usually, the cause depends on when the seizure started.

If the onset of seizure happened before age 2, the causes of seizures typically includes high grade fever or short-term metabolic abnormality such as irregular blood levels of sugar, calcium or sodium. These can set off a kind or more of seizure.

A seizure, most of the time, does not happen during the resolution of the fever or the abnormality. If this happens, the source can be expected as an injury at birth, other birth defects, genetic abnormality in metabolism or a brain anomaly.

The causes of seizures is often unknown if the seizure onset is between the age of 2 and 14.

A head injury, stroke, or tumor may damage the brain, causing a seizure. Sudden alcohol withdrawal is the common causes of seizures for the early to mid adult age group.

On the other hand, the causes of seizures are unknown in almost 50% of the affected people in these age groups.

Seizures with no recognizable cause are labeled as idiopathic.

Diseases are frequently a factor in the onset of seizures. These may consist of progressive liver disease, types of dementia, disorders of the nervous system, hereditary diseases, kidney failure, such as chronic renal failure and infections of the brain and its extensions which include encephalitis, brain abscess or meningitis.

The most usual injuries that may cause seizures include airway obstruction, vehicular or sports accidents that cause injury to the head, injury during pregnancy or birth and toxic animal bites or insect stings.

Other conditions that may cause seizures involve brain surgery, use of illegal drugs such as cocaine, chemical poisoning and improper or abrupt withdrawal from some medicines.

There are two general categories of seizure which include the provoked and unprovoked types.

The causes of unprovoked seizures fall under the most common causes of epilepsy and related seizure disorders.

A solitary seizure which resulted from a stimulus like lack of oxygen in the brain is called a provoked seizure and accordingly, is called a non-epileptic seizure. This may be experienced by a person without a seizure disorder history.

Most of the time, the causes of provoked seizures include sleep deprivation, head injury which may cause non-epileptic post-traumatic seizures or post-traumatic epilepsy in which the seizures chronically recur. Drug intoxication, brain infection, high fever that leads to convulsions, hypoglycemia, hyponatremia and hypoxia also causes seizures.

A few treatments create a greater possibility of seizures like electroconvulsive therapy or ECT that intentionally mean to bring on a seizure used to treat major depression.

Also, seizures can transpire subsequent to witnessing a disturbing and traumatic incident. This form of seizure is also identified as a psychogenic non-epileptic seizure. It is correlated to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Individuals with previous seizure attacks have a greater chance of having a seizure when they are under excess physical or emotional tension.

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Seizures: What Causes Them?

For the human brain to function normally, it needs an organized, orderly, and well-coordinated discharge of electrical impulses. Such electrical impulses allow the brain to communicate with the muscles, nerves, cord, and with itself. When the brain’s normal electrical activity interrupted, the person can experience seizures.

A seizure or convulsion happens when there’s a burst of immediate, contradictory signals that come from the brain cells. The causes of seizures, in general, can be found by a lot of things, injuries, conditions, and many other factors. They are usually followed by temporary memory loss. Brain damage may also take place especially if the seizure is prolonged and severe.

Among the causes of seizures are:

• Abnormalities of the brain or in the person’s blood vessels

• Hardening of arteries

• Atherosclerosis

• Bleeding into the brain like:

• Brain tumors

• Subarachnoid hemorrhage

• Congenital diseases

• Chromosomal abnormalities

• Pregnancy

• High blood pressure

• Problems caused by stroke, pregnancy, and mini-stroke

Other contributing factors to the causes of seizures are diseases like:

• Alzheimer’s disease

• Advanced liver disease

• Epilepsy

• Dementia

• Hereditary diseases

• Ailments in the nervous system

• Infections that affect the brain such as:

• Encephalitis

• Bacterial meningitis

• Brain abscess

• Encephalitis

• Kidney failure like chronic renal failure

When it comes to injuries, the ones that may lead to seizures include injury in the person’s uterus, electrical injuries, and poisonous stings or insect bites. Head injuries, especially those that bring rapid, forceful impact to the brain tissue, also bring electrical disturbances that may causes of seizures. Such injuries are often times caused by car, motorcycle, or sports accidents.

The causes of seizures may also happen if the person’s brain is deprived of oxygen particularly after drowning or choking accidents. Lack of oxygen during birth may also cause damage in the brain’s electrical system. Lead poisoning and problems in the baby’s brain development before birth causes of seizures as well.

In children, the most known causes of seizures are high fever because increased temperature normally generates electrical disturbances in the person’s brain. The said condition is dubbed as febrile seizure or infantile spasm. Seizure activity can also be observed on infants who had trauma while being born. The common causes of seizures in children below two years old are brief metabolic abnormalities including abnormal levels of calcium, glucose, vitamin B6, sodium, or magnesium in the blood.

Once the fever subsides or the abnormality is resolved, seizures will no longer be experienced. If seizures happen again without the above-mentioned triggers, then it is possible that they are caused by a birth defect, an injury while giving birth, eclampsia, brain disorder, or genetic metabolic irregularity. Tetanus can also cause seizures.

Moreover, temporary conditions like drug overdose and drug withdrawal may also lead to seizures. Among the popular seizure-causing drugs is crack cocaine. There are also cases when a problem or health condition that affects the brain’s nerve cells is inherited or passed down through families. When seizures are recurrent and have nothing to do with fever or known acute brain damage, the condition is called seizure disorder or epilepsy.

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Known Causes of Seizures

With the exception of the elderly and infants, the causes of seizures are often unidentifiable. There are plenty of things that can upset the delicate system of nerve cell communication. Often, these are things that cannot be pinned down right away.

What is clear is that in a seizure, something goes awry with the electrical impulses in the brain. Nerve cells keep on firing electrical impulses which are not received by other nerve cells that are supposed to receive them. This results in a surge of energy in the brain, leading to loss of consciousness and abnormal movements of certain body parts that are controlled by the areas of the brain that are undergoing malfunction.

In about 70% of all people who have epilepsy and in the majority of people who have had one or more attacks of seizure, the causes of seizures cannot be found. For the rest of the patients, the causes of seizures can be anything that alters the way the brain functions or works. The following are the most common causes of seizures according to age bracket:

Newborns

Temporary metabolic abnormalities which may include abnormal levels of calcium, vitamin B6, sugar or glucose, magnesium and sodium in the body can trigger seizures among infants and toddlers. High fevers are also a very common cause. Seizures that root from these causes often resolve on their own, and can be expected not to recur. But a repetitive attack that has no trigger, otherwise called as unprovoked epilepsy, may be caused by any of the following: brain malfunctions, brain injury, lack of oxygen during birth, maternal drug use, infection, and intracranial hemorrhage.

Neonatal seizure is among the most common types of seizure observed among children. It is often difficult to identify this occurring because most of the classic symptoms associated with the condition are absent such as loss of consciousness and convulsions. Instead, infants experiencing neonatal seizures may repetitively smack their lips, look in different directions with periods of no breathing.

Infants and Children

Three percent of children in the United States experience a seizure or two sometime during their infant hood and childhood. Half of the cases are classified as febrile seizure or the types of seizure that is associated with fever. Only 1% of all children experiencing recurring seizure qualifies as epilepsy.

Infants with febrile seizure are most likely to have contracted illness or infection such as chickenpox, cold, and ear infection that is accompanied by fever.

Children and Adults

Three out of four cases of seizure in children have causes that are unidentifiable. In 25% of all children with seizure, a disorder or two have been found to be the underlying problem. These include fainting, migraines, night terrors, breath-holding spells, and other psychiatric disturbances. Developmental problems such as cerebral palsy, meningitis and head injury and trauma are also known to trigger seizure at a very young age.

Among adults, structural damages in the brain caused by head trauma or injury as well as serious medical conditions like stroke are among the top causes of seizures. Withdrawal from chemical substances like alcohol and use or overdose of addictive recreational drugs like cocaine and amphetamines may also trigger the familiar symptoms of seizure.

Elderly

Seizures among the elderly are typically caused by a degenerative condition called Alzheimer's disease, by stroke and by head trauma.

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