5

An epileptic seizure is a transient occurrence of signs and/or symptoms due to abnormally excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. - Wiley Online Library

What can I do to prevent myself from getting a epileptic seizure? Cause-effect answers that explain triggers would be appreciated.

Dave Liu
  • 4,876
  • 1
  • 21
  • 55
Akshay Vasu
  • 3,354
  • 1
  • 21
  • 41
  • 1
    This is effectively three questions in one. First it is asking what is a seizure, and second it is asking how to prevent getting one, and third it is asking how are they triggered. – Kenshin Apr 29 '15 at 14:41
  • Does this assume that you have some preexisting condition, or not? – HDE 226868 Dec 01 '15 at 03:44
  • Voted to close as too broad. Since the question offers no narrowing of scope it boils down to: What causes epilepsy? Far too broad a question to be answered here. – Carey Gregory Mar 11 '16 at 00:29

1 Answers1

4

I have found following peer-reviewed paper which provides a review of the nonpharmaceutic conservative interventions for the prevention of seizures:

Wolf P. The role of nonpharmaceutic conservative interventions in the treatment and secondary prevention of epilepsy. Epilepsia. 2002;43 Suppl 9:2-5. 1

It says (I have kept the essential parts):

The first step is the identification of factors facilitating the occurrence of seizures. In the second step, strategies to control these factors are developed. Most common are disturbances of the sleep-wake cycle, especially reduction of sleep. Patients should follow a regular sleep schedule with deviations of not >2 h. Sometimes a sleep calendar is helpful. Night shifts are not compatible with seizure prevention in these cases. (...) Other nonspecific facilitators of seizures include uncontrolled use of alcohol and extraordinary stress. Patients must learn how to cope with stressful events.

It also provides some preventive measures for specific types of epilepsies:

In reflex epilepsies, specific precipitants of seizures are the targets of interventions. Thus, most patients with primary reading epilepsy begin to have, with prolonged reading, perioral reflex myoclonias, which enable them to stop reading and thus to avoid a GTC seizure. In photosensitive patients, seizures are often precipitated by television. These can be avoided by viewing from a distance and using a remote control, small screens in a well-lit room, and preferably with a 100-Hz line shift. Environmental flicker stimulation often comes unexpectedly, and it is advisable that the patients always wear sunglasses in brightly lighted surroundings. Polarized glasses seem to be more protective than plain sunglasses. If the patient has only photically induced seizures, treatment by specific prevention alone may be sufficient, but if spontaneous seizures also occur, drugs must be given in addition.

Hope this helps!

Felipe
  • 882
  • 4
  • 12