Having epilepsy means that you have a tendency to have epileptic seizures.
What is a seizure?
A seizure happens when there is a sudden burst of intense electrical activity in the brain. This is often referred to as epileptic activity. The epileptic activity causes a temporary disruption to the way the brain normally works, so the brain’s messages become mixed up.
What happens to you during a seizure will depend on where in your brain the epileptic activity begins, and how widely and quickly it spreads.
For this reason, there are around 40 different types of seizure, and a person may have more than one type, which means everyone will experience epilepsy in a way that is unique to them.
How seizures affect you depends on the area of your brain affected by the epileptic activity. For example:
Some people lose consciousness during a seizure but other people don’t
Some people have strange sensations, or parts of their body might twitch or jerk
Other people fall to the floor and convulse (this is when they jerk violently as their muscles tighten and relax repeatedly)
Seizures usually last between a few seconds and several minutes. After a seizure, the person’s brain and body will usually return to normal.
Some people only ever have seizures when they are awake. Other people only ever have them when they are asleep. Some people have a mixture of both.
Seizures can start at any age, but are most common in children and older people.
“Triggers”
Some things make seizures more likely for some people with epilepsy. These are often called ‘triggers’.
Triggers can be things like:
Not everyone has seizures triggers, but for those who do, avoiding triggers lowers the risk of having a seizure.
A person will no longer be considered to have epilepsy if they:
Seizure classification
The International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), a worldwide organisation of epilepsy professionals, has put together a list of the names of different seizure types. This is called the ILAE seizure classification.
Some people use different words to describe seizures. But it is important for doctors to give seizures the right names. This is because specific medicines and treatments can help some seizure types but not others.
Focal seizures
The brain is made up of four types of “lobes”:
Seizures can start in any of these lobes. What happens during a seizure will be different, depending on which lobe, and which part of the lobe, the seizure starts in. Each person will have their own experiences and symptoms during a focal seizure.
For more information on what happens during a seizure depending on these lobes, click here.
Todd’ Paresis (sometimes called Todd’s Paralysis)
Focal seizures that act as a warning of a generalised seizure
Generalised seizures
Tonic-clonic seizures
There are two phases in a tonic-clonic seizure: the ‘tonic’ phase, followed by the ‘clonic’ phase:
Tonic seizures
Atonic seizures (sometimes called drop attacks)
Myoclonic seizures
Absence seizures
Typical absences
Atypical absences
Febrile seizures
Febrile seizures happen to around three out of every hundred children under the age of five. They are usually linked to a childhood illness such as tonsillitis, or teething.
Febrile seizures are not epilepsy. However, children who have had febrile seizures have a slightly higher chance of developing epilepsy later on than children in general.
What to do if someone has a seizure
Watch this video:
For more information on what to do if someone has a seizure, visit Epilepsy Action’s website and YouTube page{
To read more about Epilepsy, try these: