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