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Can ayurvedic or herbal treatments Treat Epilepsy? What Is Epilepsy? Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder that is characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms due to abnormal, excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy at any one time. Epilepsy is usually controlled, but not cured, with medication, although surgery may be considered in difficult cases. Not all epilepsy syndromes are lifelong – some forms are confined to particular stages of childhood. Epilepsy should not be understood as a single disorder, but rather as a group of syndromes with vastly divergent symptoms but all involving episodic abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Epilepsy is the most common neurological condition in children and the third most common in adults after Alzheimer’s and stroke. Despite modern therapy, about one million people continue to experience seizures or significant side effects from treatment. This poses a major problem for the management of epilepsy in these patients. An Epilepsy Foundation report published in 2000 revealed that epilepsy costs the US more than $16.6 billion a year in health care and unemployment. Epilepsy is a generic term used to define a family of seizure disorders. A person with recurring seizures is said to have epilepsy. A seizure is a brief disturbance of electrical activity in the brain. Prevalence: More than 3 million people in the U.S. have some form of epilepsy. Thirty percent of them are children under the age of 18. A large number of children and adults have undetected or untreated epilepsy. The diagnosis of epilepsy requires the presence of recurrent, unprovoked seizures; accordingly, it is usually made based on the medical history. EEG, brain MRI, SPECT, PET, and magnetoencephalography may be useful to discover an etiology for the epilepsy, discover the affected brain region, or classify the epileptic syndrome, but these studies are not useful in making the initial diagnosis. Long-term video-EEG monitoring for epilepsy is the gold standard for diagnosis, but it is not routinely employed owing to its high cost, low availability and inconvenience. Convulsive or other seizure-like activity, non-epileptic in origin, can be observed in many other medical conditions. These non-epileptic seizures can be hard to differentiate and may lead to misdiagnosis. Epilepsy covers conditions with different aetiologies, natural histories and prognoses, each requiring different management strategies. A full medical diagnosis requires a definite categorisation of seizure and syndrome types. The diagnosis of epilepsy requires that the seizures be unprovoked, with the implication that the provocant is assumed to be something obviously harmful. Seizures due to alcohol or drug withdrawal, or immediately after a head injury, for example, do not imply a diagnosis of epilepsy. Most forms of epilepsy result in seizures that happen apparently spontaneously and at random. However, in some epilepsy syndromes, the provocant can reasonably be considered to be part of normal daily life. Examples of these normal provocants include reading, hot water on the head, hyperventilation, and flashing or flickering lights. This last provocant is a special type of reflex epilepsy called photosensitive epilepsy. Although it is mistakenly assumed that photosensitivity is a common element to all epilepsies, among both patients and the public, only between 2-14% of people with epilepsy are affected by flickering lights. Photosensitivity amongst the general population is in the range of 0.3-3%. Though, most people who are sensitive to light will never have a seizure during their life. Epilepsy is usually treated with medication prescribed by a physician; primary caregivers, neurologists, and neurosurgeons all frequently care for people with epilepsy. In some cases the implantation of a stimulator of the vagus nerve, or a special diet can be helpful. Neurosurgical operations for epilepsy can be palliative, reducing the frequency or severity of seizures; or, in some patients, an operation can be curative.
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