National Epilepsy Month: Neurologist talks about risks and treatment

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - November is National Epilepsy Awareness month, and it’s a health issue that impacts the brain and leads to seizures.

Dr. William Boles at Novant Health says 30% of seizures in younger people are due to genetics. Seizures for people over the age of 65 can most times be a result of a stroke or brain injury.

Dr. Boles says similar to many medical conditions, part of being proactive in preventing a seizure is living a healthy lifestyle.

“Just because someone has a genetic disposition, maybe they have a gene mutation, there’s still environmental causes that can increase the risk and that goes back to that kind of healthy living, you know, avoiding chemical exposures, you know, toxic type chemicals as much as possible,” Dr. Boles said. “A lot of that’s healthy living, right, you know, eating a healthy diet, exercise, and that helps minimize some of those vascular type risk factors for epilepsy, you know, there’s other things that can happen, people can just develop abnormal brain, blood vessels in the brain, and that some of those things are harder to prevent.”

Dr. Boles says seizures usually last a minute to two and will end on their own, but if it lasts longer you should call 911. First responders have medicine that would help stop a seizure if it does not end on its own.

Just like medical treatments for many other conditions and diseases, epilepsy treatments have advanced greatly over the past few years. Dr. Boles said there are a number of options available between medication and surgical operations to help treat those with epilepsy.

What is a seizure?

“So a seizure is where I think it was kind of abnormal electrical activity in the brain. So it’s like the brain, the nerves become hyperactive, and they can’t perform a normal function. So that’s what a seizure is. And then another thing to think about as medical term called provoked or unprovoked, and what that specifically means if it’s something’s provoked, it means something caused a seizure. So it can be many things that could cause a seizure getting hit in the head, so some type of trauma, it’d be some kind of chemical exposure, anything like that, can that could trigger a seizure, that’d be provoked seizure,” Dr. Boles explained.

Epilepsy is when someone has two or more unprovoked seizures.

Who can have epilepsy or a seizure?

“So part of the typical workup is to get MRI is to look for some kind of structural change. So could they have a, you know, like a brain tumor, sometimes that’s what it is, can be an old head injury. So someone may have had a head injury at age 20, and may not develop seizures for several years later, that can also occur. And so yeah, just different reasons why people might have a brain injury, then also, if someone’s ever had a brain infection, you know, so you say they have a viral encephalitis, or bacterial meningitis, these types of brain infections. And very rarely, with COVID-19 people have had seizures. So there’s some central nervous system, side effects or symptoms from, from COVID,” Dr. Boles said.

Dr. Boles also mentioned the importance of following concussion protocol as multiple concussions can lead to a brain injury.

“There’s a lot of protocols these days, you know, I think about sports with concussion protocols. Following those as important, you know, if you’ve had one concussion, and you’re the next one to two weeks, you’re really high, high risk of having another so you don’t want to have multiple concussions through your life. So, following those guidelines is important.”

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