Cerebral palsy and epilepsy

Epilepsy

Epilepsy is the disorder of the brain. The affected person will have recurring seizures. The seizure is bound to happen when the electrical signals sent by the nerve cells are disturbed.

The disturbances in the electrical signals sent by the nerve cells can affect your sense, awareness of your surrounding and even the movement of your body. At the time of seizure the nerve cells fire electrical signals together and faster than the usual speed.

Causes of epilepsy

In majority of the cases there is no specific reason for epilepsy. Illness, trauma, accident, infection, tumor, stroke etc can all lead to epilepsy. In some case epilepsy is inherited. Epilepsy in not treated or controlled can become life threatening.

The epilepsy may occur for short time. Epilepsy can make it appearance infrequently. But you can never consider epilepsy as harmless as it may cause serious injuries to you during its brief occurrence [epilepsy while driving].

Cerebral palsy and epilepsy

In patients with cerebral palsy the seizures or epilepsy causes disturbances in the electrical signal pathway in the brain. This results in tonic -clonic seizures. In this kind of seizure the disturbed electrical signals spreads throughout the brain and the symptoms can be felt all over the body.

In case of partial seizure where the electrical signal disturbance is confined to one part of the brain, the symptoms are noticed in specific part or portion of the body.

There were many studies conducted about the epilepsy, its occurrence, pattern etc in patients with cerebral palsy and mental retardation. Many interesting and useful information were gathered during those studies. Some of them are mentioned below.

10 to 32 % of the people with cerebral palsy developed seizures or epilepsy. Nearly 10 to 29% people with mental retardation developed epilepsy. 50 % the patients who are having both cerebral palsy and mental retardation have the chance of developing epilepsy.

Some of the children with cerebral palsy do have seizures but they are non-epileptic. One such seizure is "sleep start”. Here the child with cerebral palsy will have tonic contractions for a brief period of time. This is not epilepsy. For these children there is no need for non-epileptic medication.

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