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  • what-is-childhood-epilepsy
  1. About childhood epilepsy
  2. What is childhood epilepsy?

What is childhood epilepsy?

Childhood epilepsy: facts and terminology

Normal brain function is made possible by millions of tiny electrical charges passing across nerve cells in the brain and to all parts of the body. In a seizure, this normal pattern may be interrupted by intermittent bursts of electrical energy that are much more intense than usual. These 'storms' affect the delicate systems responsible for the brain's electrical energy, and may affect a person's consciousness, awareness, movement and bodily posture for a short time. Normal brain function cannot return until the electrical bursts subside. In a nutshell, epilepsy is the tendency to have repeated seizures.

According to Epilepsy Action, epilepsy affects at least 600,000 people in the UK - just over 60,000 of these people are children under the age of 16. Epilepsy is the most common serious neurological condition in the world and can affect anyone at any time in their life - it has no respect for age, sex, race, or social class. Seizures tend to develop in childhood or by late adolescence, but the likelihood of developing epilepsy rises again after the age of sixty-five. There are around forty different seizure types and one in twenty people will have a single seizure at sometime in their life. You can develop epilepsy as a result of the brain being injured in some way, perhaps as a result of severe head injury, difficulties at birth or a serious infection which affects the brain, such as meningitis or encephalitis, a stroke or a tumour. Problems with a child's metabolism or faulty chromosomes can also result in epilepsy.

Epilepsy with a known cause is called symptomatic epilepsy, however, in the majority of cases, no cause can be found and this is called idiopathic epilepsy. Some children have what is known ascryptogenic epilepsy. This means that the doctors think there is probably a cause for the epilepsy, but they are unable to discover what it is.

There are more than 60,000 children in the UK who are diagnosed with epilepsy.

Over 18,000 of these children suffer from drug-resistant epilepsy. 

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Every single penny donated goes directly to The Daisy Garland charity helping children with drug-resistant epilepsy reach their full potential in life. Read more

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Published: 9th April, 2018

Updated: 4th February, 2022

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