Epilepsy – Types

Transcript

So with respect to anatomic or specific types of epilepsy and seizures, there’s actually several different types of, which is one of the ways, one of the reasons it’s so interesting for me and I think difficult for patients to understand. I would back up and say that in general, seizures come in two different types. One type is from a very specific area of the brain. We call those focal or partial seizures. And then there are seizures that come from everywhere in the brain at once we call those generalized seizures. And then that also then applies to the epilepsy. And that there are generalized epilepsies and focal epilepsies or localization-related epilepsies. And those, those differences actually have a huge impact on what the symptoms are and what the patient feels. And the big difference is in the generalized seizures, they start everywhere in the brain at once. And the way that I tend to think about them is that often these are genetic epilepsies. So the gene is in every cell of the brain. So when someone has a seizure, everything goes off at once. There’s no warning, they can’t tell it’s happened and just boom, it happens. And they can have several different types of seizures.