IUBio

Brain Cell Damage Due to Epilepsy?

wayne wayne-pierce at email.msn.com
Sun Feb 13 12:24:54 EST 2000


Bill,

Thanks for your comments. Mine are of the Simple Partial Seizure type; do
you feel this would make a difference?

Wayne


Bill Skaggs <skaggs at bns.pitt.edu> wrote in message
news:m7u2jqjj9o.fsf at skaggs.bns.pitt.edu...
> "wayne" <wayne-pierce at email.msn.com> writes:
>
> > When I began to have seizures around five years ago, I suddenly became
> > extremely emotional and my thought processes changed. A psychiatrist
told me
> > that the change in sensitivity was due to the seizures. I have also read
> > somewhere that seizures can cause brain damage. Any comments would be
> > appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks,   Wayne
>
> Well, seizures can indeed cause brain damage, but usually not unless
> they are very frequent (i.e., several times per day), and even then,
> as I understand it, the damage builds up gradually, over the course of
> months or years.  It's unlikely that the sudden change you experienced
> was caused by brain damage.
>
> It's pretty clear that seizures in and of themselves, without brain
> damage, can have strong effects on mood.  For one thing, artificially
> induced seizures (ECT) have long been known to be a very effective
> treatment for depression.  (Nobody knows how this treatment works,
> though.)  For another thing, one of the most seizure-prone parts of
> the brain is the amygdala, which plays a very important role in
> emotion.  Seizures that affect the amygdala or the neighboring
> temporal lobe are sometimes associated with emotional outbursts.
>
> There are a number of different possible causes of seizures.  In many
> cases, they are caused by abnormal electrical activity in some part of
> the brain, and the abnormal activity can express itself to some degree
> even apart from full-blown seizures.  Something of this sort would
> very likely show up on an EEG, which undoubtedly has been performed on
> you several times.  If the EEG showed abnormal activity in the
> temporal lobes, this would certainly be consistent with the story
> you're telling.
>
> The most important question I would want to know the answer to is,
> what caused the seizures in the first place?
>
> -- Bill






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