What is happening in the brain during a seizure?

A seizure occurs when there is sudden abnormal electrical activity that temporarily interrupts normal brain function. Large groups of neurons fire at the same time like an electrical storm inside the brain that usually lasts from 30 seconds to two minutes.

What does the brain do during a seizure?

During an epileptic seizure, the firing pattern of your neurons changes. This can lead to many neurons generating electrical pulses at the same time, which you experience as a seizure.

What part of the brain is affected when you have a seizure?

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.

What is happening in the brain of a person who is having an epileptic seizure?

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.

Does having a seizure damage the brain?

Most types of seizures do not cause damage to the brain. However, having a prolonged, uncontrolled seizure can cause harm. Because of this, treat any seizure lasting over 5 minutes as a medical emergency.

What Happens in Your Brain During a Seizure | WebMD

What happens to your body after a seizure?

During the postictal period, you may be sleepy. You may have problems with vision or speech, and may have a bad headache, fatigue, or body aches. Not all of these phases occur in everyone with this type of seizure.

Are seizures painful?

In general, the actual experience of having a seizure does not hurt. Pain during seizures is rare . Some types of seizures make you lose consciousness.

Are you conscious during a seizure?

Focal and generalized seizures

Since the seizure only affects one region, you might stay conscious or have a slight change in consciousness. You might be aware of sensations that occur during the seizure. A generalized seizure involves both sides of the brain. In most cases, you lose consciousness.

What does it feel like before a seizure?

Some patients may have a feeling of having lived a certain experience in the past, known as “déjà vu.” Other warning signs preceding seizures include daydreaming, jerking movements of an arm, leg, or body, feeling fuzzy or confused, having periods of forgetfulness, feeling tingling or numbness in a part of the body, ...

What are the 3 main phases of a seizure?

Seizures take on many different forms and have a beginning (prodrome and aura), middle (ictal) and end (post-ictal) stage.

What part of the brain is removed to stop seizures?

Hemispherectomy is a procedure to remove one side (hemisphere) of the folded gray matter of the brain (cerebral cortex). This surgery is generally reserved for children who experience seizures that originate from multiple sites in one hemisphere, usually the result of a condition present at birth or in early infancy.

How long can a seizure last before brain damage?

A seizure that lasts longer than 5 minutes, or having more than 1 seizure within a 5 minutes period, without returning to a normal level of consciousness between episodes is called status epilepticus. This is a medical emergency that may lead to permanent brain damage or death.

What are the 4 types of seizures?

There are four main types of epilepsy: focal, generalized, combination focal and generalized, and unknown. A person's seizure type determines what kind of epilepsy they have. Different types of seizures affect the brain in different ways.

What happens to neurons during epilepsy?

In epilepsy, the normal pattern of neuronal activity becomes disturbed, causing strange sensations, emotions, and behavior, or sometimes convulsions, muscle spasms, and loss of consciousness. During a seizure, neurons may fire as many as 500 times a second, much faster than the normal rate of about 80 times a second.

What is the pathophysiology of a seizure?

The basic premise of generalized tonic-clonic seizure pathophysiology is that seizures start with a robust excitation of susceptible epileptic cerebral neurons, which leads to synchronous discharges of progressively larger groups of connected neurons eventually affecting a part of the brain that leads to the clinical ...

Can you hear during a seizure?

Common symptoms during a seizure.

Periods of forgetfulness or memory lapses. Distracted, daydreaming. Loss of consciousness, unconscious, or “pass out” Unable to hear.

How do you prevent a seizure when you feel it coming?

Can you fight off a seizure?

In cases where the aura is a smell, some people are able to fight off seizures by sniffing a strong odor, such as garlic or roses. When the preliminary signs include depression, irritability, or headache, an extra dose of medication (with a doctor's approval) may help prevent an attack.

Do you remember seizures?

In focal aware seizures (FAS), previously called simple partial seizures, the person is conscious (aware and alert) and will usually know that something is happening and will remember the seizure afterwards. Some people find their focal aware seizures hard to put into words.

Is it OK to sleep after seizure?

After the seizure: they may feel tired and want to sleep. It might be helpful to remind them where they are. stay with them until they recover and can safely return to what they had been doing before.

How long does it take to recover after a seizure?

Some people feel better after an hour or 2, but for some people it can take several days to feel 'back to normal'. Some people find they have temporary weakness or can't move part of their body after they've had a seizure.

How do seizures lead to death?

A seizure may cause a person to have pauses in breathing (apnea). If these pauses last too long, they can reduce the oxygen in the blood to a life-threatening level. In addition, during a convulsive seizure a person's airway sometimes may get covered or obstructed, leading to suffocation. Heart rhythm.

Do seizures show up on MRI?

Does epilepsy show up on MRI scans? No, not necessarily. An MRI scan can help your doctor understand some of the possible underlying structural causes of your seizures. However, for many people there is no structural cause behind their epilepsy and so the brain scan comes back 'normal'.

Why does my head hurt after a seizure?

Headaches may occur before seizures and are common after tonic-clonic seizures. In rare cases, the brain wave changes seen on the EEG show that a headache can actually be the only symptom of a seizure. If you have a seizure disorder, you are twice as likely to have migraine headaches.

Can stress cause a seizure?

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.