Patient's question:
What are the causes or risk factors of epilepsy? How come children have epilepsy attacks for no reason?Doctor's answer:
Common causes of epilepsy include:1. Congenital malformations: such as chromosomal abnormalities, congenital hydrocephalus, microcephaly, corpus callosum agenesis, and cortical dysgenesis.
2. Prenatal and perinatal diseases: birth injuries are a common cause of symptomatic epilepsy in infancy.
3. Post-heatstroke sequelae: severe and prolonged high fever seizures can lead to brain damage, including neuron loss and gliosis, primarily in the medial temporal lobe, especially the hippocampus.
4. Cranial head trauma: individuals with post-traumatic epilepsy often have depressed fractures, torn dura mater, and local neurological signs, along with long-term memory impairment.
5. Infections: seen in various bacterial meningitis, brain abscesses, granulomas, viral encephalitis, and parasitic diseases such as pork tapeworm, schistosomiasis, and toxoplasmosis.
6. Poisoning: lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, ethanol, strychnine, and isoniazid poisoning, as well as systemic diseases like preeclampsia and uremia, can all trigger epilepsy.
7. Intracranial tumors
8. Cerebrovascular diseases: while stroke-related epilepsy is more common in middle-aged and elderly individuals, especially brain embolism, thrombosis, and multiple lacunar recurrences, cerebral arteriovenous malformations and subarachnoid hemorrhage typically cause epilepsy in younger patients. Hypertensive encephalopathy is also often associated with epilepsy.
9. Nutritional and metabolic diseases: children with rickets frequently develop epilepsy. In adults, conditions such as insulinoma-induced hypoglycemia, diabetes, hyperthyroidism, hypoparathyroidism, and vitamin B6 deficiency can lead to recurrence.