What Causes Seizures

On the whole, seizures are caused by various conditions like illness, injury and many more health issues. These health problems may include anomalies in the veins and arteries of the brain which may be the hardening of the vessels supplying the brain with blood and oxygen, bleeding or hemorrhage, brain tumors,
chromosome problems, congenital abnormalities, hypertension, stroke and ischemia.

Usually, the cause depends on when the seizure started.

If the onset of seizure happened before age 2, the causes typically includes high grade fever or short-term metabolic abnormality such as irregular blood levels of sugar, calcium or sodium. These can set off a kind or more of seizure.

A seizure, most of the time, does not happen during the resolution of the fever or the abnormality. If this happens, the source can be expected as an injury at birth, other birth defects, genetic abnormality in metabolism or a brain anomaly.

The cause is often unknown if the seizure onset is between the age of 2 and 14.

A head injury, stroke, or tumor may damage the brain, causing a seizure. Sudden alcohol withdrawal is a common cause of seizure for the early to mid adult age group.

On the other hand, the cause of seizure is unknown in almost 50% of the affected people in these age groups.

Seizures with no recognizable cause are labeled as idiopathic.

Diseases are frequently a factor in the onset of seizures. These may consist of progressive liver disease, types of dementia, disorders of the nervous system, hereditary diseases, kidney failure, such as chronic renal failure and infections of the brain and its extensions which include encephalitis, brain abscess or meningitis.

The most usual injuries that may cause seizures include airway obstruction, vehicular or sports accidents that cause injury to the head, injury during pregnancy or birth and toxic animal bites or insect stings.

Other conditions that may cause seizures involve brain surgery, use of illegal drugs such as cocaine, chemical poisoning and improper or abrupt withdrawal from some medicines.
There are two general categories of seizure which include the provoked and unprovoked types.

The causes of unprovoked seizures fall under the most common causes of epilepsy and related seizure disorders.

A solitary seizure which resulted from a stimulus like lack of oxygen in the brain is called a provoked seizure and accordingly, is called a nonepileptic seizure. This may be experienced by a person without a seizure disorder history.

Most of the time, the causes of provoked seizures include sleep deprivation, head injury which may cause non-epileptic post-traumatic seizures or post-traumatic epilepsy in which the seizures chronically recur. Drug intoxication, brain infection, high fever that leads to convulsions, hypoglycemia, hyponatremia and hypoxia also causes seizures.

A few treatments create a greater possibility of seizures like electroconvulsive therapy or ECT that intentionally mean to bring on a seizure used to treat major depression.

Also, seizures can transpire subsequent to witnessing a disturbing and traumatic incident. This form of seizure is also identified as a psychogenic non-epileptic seizure. It is correlated to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Individuals with previous seizure attacks have a greater chance of having a seizure when they are under excess physical or emotional tension.