During a seizure, you may feel strange and act oddly. Your muscles may go limp or stiff, and you may shake, twitch or black out. Seizures tend to pass quickly. Most people are back to normal within a few minutes.

Although epilepsy is a serious condition, it should not stop you or your child from leading a healthy, active life. Drug treatments work well. Most people stop having seizures, or at least have them less often, once they get the right medication.

To understand what happens in epilepsy, it's useful to know how the brain normally works.

The brain is one of your body's most important organs. It controls everything you do.

Your brain is made up of billions of nerve cells that share information with one another. These cells are organized in chains. They are not actually joined together, but they sit close to each other with a space between them called a synapse.

Groups of nerve cells have specific jobs to do. For example:

To learn more, see The parts of the brain and what they do.

Nerve cells allow the brain to receive, process and send information.

In epilepsy, nerve cells in the brain tend to become over-excited.

A seizure affects how the brain does its many jobs. This is why a person having a seizure feels strange and acts in odd ways. Seizures can affect nerve cells in one particular part of the brain (these are called partial seizures). Or they can affect nerve cells all over the brain (these are called generalized seizures). To learn more, see What are the symptoms of epilepsy?

Sometimes, only a small group of nerve cells becomes over-excited. When this happens, the seizure may start off affecting only one part of your body. Your hand may shake or feel stiff, for example. But then other cells nearby may join in and start firing signals. This makes your symptoms worse. For example, a whole arm or one side of your body may shake or feel numb.

Because different parts of the brain do different jobs, the symptoms you or your child gets depend on where in the brain the burst of electrical activity happens. To read more, see The parts of the brain and what they do.

Unfortunately, we know very little about why seizures happen or how they start and stop. But doctors think that epilepsy may be due to a problem with:

 

 

 

 

 

Source:
Lowenstein DH.
Seizures and epilepsy.
In: Braunwald E, Hauser SL, Fauci AS, et al. Harrison's principles of internal medicine. 15th edition. McGraw-Hill, New York, U.S.A.; 2001.

 

 

 

 

 

¹

We know that two brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) are important for slowing down and speeding up electrical signals in the brain:

Doctors think that if you have too much glutamate in your brain, this could lead to too many electrical signals firing at once. And if you have too little GABA, then electrical signals can fire out of control. Some drugs help to control seizures by affecting the levels of these chemicals in the brain. To learn more, see What treatments work for epilepsy?

Your doctor may not be able to tell you why you or your child has epilepsy. About 7 in 10 people with epilepsy never find out the cause. When a cause isn't clear, sometimes the condition is due to a problem with certain

 

 

 

 

 

genes
Your genes are the parts of your cells that contain instructions for how your body works. Genes are housed on chromosomes, structures that sit in the nucleus at the middle of each of your cells. You have 23 pairs of chromosomes in your normal cells, each of which has thousands of genes. You get one set of chromosomes, and all of the genes that are on them, from each of your parents.

 

 

 

 

 

genes that control how the brain works.

 

 

 

 

 

Source:
Hauser WA, Annegers JF.
Risk factors for epilepsy.
Epilepsy Research. Supplement. 1991; 4: 45-52.

 

 

 

 

 

²

But for some people, an illness, infection, injury or problem in the way their brain developed has caused their epilepsy.

 

 

 

 

 

Source:
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Seizures and epilepsy: hope through research.
October 2008. Available at http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/epilepsy/detail_epilepsy.htm (accessed on 6 November 2008).

 

 

 

 

 

³ All these things can change the structure of the brain, upsetting the way electrical signals work and leading to seizures.

If you get epilepsy as an adult, you're more likely to find out what caused the condition than if you get it as a child.

Some things that increase your chances of getting epilepsy, such as having a

 

 

 

 

 

learning disability
People with a learning disability have trouble with the basic processes of learning. They may have problems reading, thinking or writing. But this is not because they are not intelligent enough to learn how to do these things.

 

 

 

 

 

learning disability or being older. Doctors call these risk factors. To learn more, see Who's at risk?

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