Epilepsy: A Chronic Neurological Disorder

What Is Epilepsy?

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder that can lead to repeated seizures resulting from disrupted electrical signals in the brain. This affects the normal functioning of your brain, leading to serious health complications.

How Common Is Epilepsy?

In research, it has been found that around 1.2% of people in the US are affected by epilepsy. Among those people, 3 million people are adults and 470,000 are children. According to WHO, across the world, around 50 million people are suffering from epilepsy.

What Are The Symptoms Of Epilepsy?

Though seizures are the main symptom of epilepsy, however, experiencing any of the below symptoms needs immediate medical attention:

  • Muscle stiffness
  • Mental confusion
  • Convulsion without any fever
  • Short blackouts
  • Dizziness
  • Twitching or tingling of limbs
  • Staring blankly
  • Unresponsiveness to one’s question or instruction
  • Loss of muscle strength can make you fall suddenly 
  • Performing involuntary repetitive movements like lips smacking or blinking of eyes
  • Constant jerky movements of the face, neck and arm
  • Shaking of body
  • Loss of control on bladder and bowel movements
  • Tongue biting without any purpose
  • Unconsciousness 
  • Unable to communicate
  • Panic
  • Feeling of fear for no valid reason
  • Change in sense of taste, smell, sight, hearing, or touch

Besides the above symptoms, men with epilepsy often face difficulty in getting or maintaining an erection. Research showed that epilepsy may restrict the blood supply to the genitals including your penis thus creating a hindrance in achieving an erection. However, the erection issues in men can be treated with a cenforce 200 oral pill.

Cenforce 200 is one of the effective pills prescribed by doctors to treat erection problems in men. Cenforce 200 contains sildenafil citrate which is found to be highly useful in regaining erections in men. Cenforce 200 is a PDE5 inhibitor that works by stimulating the relaxation of the arteries supplying blood to the penis, thus boosting the blood flow to the penis causing an erection.

What Leads To Epilepsy?

Your brain plays an important role in controlling your body. Epilepsy is the result of malfunctioning your brain’s normal functioning. In most cases, the exact cause behind epilepsy can not be identified. However, some of the possible causes of epilepsy:

  • Trauma or injury to head
  • Severe illness
  • High fever
  • Stroke or tumours
  • Vascular diseases
  • Alzheimer’s disease or dementia
  • Genetic disorders
  • Neurological or developmental disorder
  • Infections like AIDS and meningitis
  • cysticercosis
  • Prenatal injury or deformed brain since childbirth or lack of oxygen during childbirth

Besides these causes, the following risk factors make you more susceptible to epilepsy:

  • Age, young children and older adults are more prone to epilepsy
  • Family background of the disease
  • Injury in the brain or trauma
  • Alcohol intake
  • Premature birth or prenatal stroke
  • Infections of the central nervous system like bacterial meningitis, viral encephalitis, and neurocysticercosis

How To Treat Epilepsy?

Epilepsy isn’t curable however, its symptoms can be managed. Around 70% of people with epilepsy are able to manage their symptoms with anti-seizure medications. And half of these people may stop taking the medication without any seizure after 2 years.

Some of the effective epilepsy treatments are:

Anti-seizure medicines

These medicines can reduce the frequency of seizures. However, in some rare cases, these drugs can stop seizures. These medicines are often treated as the first line of treatment for epilepsy. The medicine is consumed orally and absorbed by your stomach from where it reaches your brain via the bloodstream. It affects the neurotransmitters in the brain which further hinder the electrical activity which is the reason behind seizures.

After this, the medicines leave your body through urine by passing through the digestive tract. Some of the most commonly prescribed anti-seizure medicines are:

  • Levetiracetam
  • Valproic acid
  • Carbamazepine
  • Ethosuximide 

Vagus Nerve Stimulator

This device when placed under the chest skin stimulates the nerve electrically which runs through your skin. This, in turn, may help in preventing seizures.

Surgery

When medicines or other methods don’t work, then brain surgery is carried out to remove or change the part of the brain which is leading to seizures.

Can Epilepsy Be Prevented?

According to WHO, around 25% of people with epilepsy can prevent the progression of the disease by adopting the following measures:

  • Always wear a helmet while riding a bicycle or a bike to prevent head injury.
  • Take care during pregnancy to prevent any prenatal injuries leading to epilepsy.
  • Managing risk factors leading to risk factors stroke or heart disease that may lead to brain injury thus causing epilepsy.
  • Prevent the occurrence of cysticercosis, which is one of the common causes of epilepsy.

What Are The Complications Related To 

Epilepsy?

As such epilepsy doesn’t have any health complications but it can lead to some situations that can be life-threatening like:

Drowning– Epilepsy makes you 13 to 19 times more prone to drowning while swimming than other people who don’t have any symptoms of epilepsy.

Falling– If you accidentally fall while having a seizure can lead to severe head or bone injury.

Accidents – If you are driving a vehicle or operating any machine then seizures can be dangerous as they may cause loss of awareness or control of the body.

Complications During Pregnancy – Seizures during pregnancy can lead to prenatal complications. It can be quite dangerous for both mother and child. Antiseizure medications can increase the chances of prenatal birth defects.

Mental Health Problems – People suffering from epilepsy are often lead to mental health problems like depression, anxiety, stress and sometimes suicidal thoughts.

Epilepsy can result in erection issues in men. The pills like cenforce 200 which are used for treating erection problems in men may turn your situation worse. Cenforce 200 helps in curing the inability of a man to have erections. Cenforce 200 also comes with some side effects which may make it unsafe for some men. Cenforce 200 can interact with a few drugs or diseases like epilepsy, thus making your condition chronic.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply