Reports indicate that more than 570,000 adults over the age of 65 suffer from the disorder. The onset rate starts to increase when individuals age, particularly as they develop strokes, brain tumors or Alzheimer's disease, all of which may cause epilepsy. The Epilepsy Therapy Project notes that 10 percent of people will have seizures in their lifetime.Įpilepsy affects more than 300,000 children under the age of 15 - and more than 90,000 young people in this group have seizures that cannot be adequately treated. Epileptic seizures may be tied to a brain injury or genetics, but for 70 percent of epilepsy patients, the cause is unknown. If the first seizure occurred at the time of an injury or infection in the brain, it is more likely the patient will develop epilepsy than if the seizure did not happen at the time of injury or infection.Īccording to the Epilepsy Foundation, epilepsy affects three million people in the U.S. If the patients does have two seizures, there is about an 80 percent chance of having more. A person is twice as likely to have another seizure if there is a known brain injury or other type of brain abnormality. Failure to take prescribed anticonvulsant medicationsĪbout half of the people who have one seizure without a clear cause will have another one, usually within six months.The following factors may increase the risk of seizures in people predisposed to seizures: The difference may seem obvious, but there are many degrees of consciousness impairment or preservation. One question that is used to further classify partial seizures is whether consciousness (the ability to respond and remember) is impaired or preserved. Some partial seizures are related to head injury, brain infection, stroke or tumor but, in most cases, the cause is unknown.
Hereditary factors are important in partial generalized epilepsy, which is more likely to involve genetic factors than partial epilepsy - a condition in which the seizures arise from a limited area of the brain. Partial seizures begin with an electrical discharge in one limited area of the brain.Įpilepsy in which the seizures begin from both sides of the brain at the same time is called primary generalized epilepsy. Primary generalized seizures begin with a widespread electrical discharge that involves both sides of the brain at once. The difference between these types is in how they begin. Typically, seizures belong in one of two basic categories: primary generalized seizures and partial seizures. Seizures vary so much that epilepsy specialists frequently re-classify seizure types.
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