Epilepsy

Epilepsy Epilepsy is a harmful and sometimes embarrassing disease of the brain. Sometimes conscious and sometimes not, epileptics have uncontrollable seizures of all types. In the United States, 3% of the population will have at least one seizure, excluding the 5% of children who have them because of elevated temperatures (1). 2.3 million Americans suffer from epilepsy and 180,000 new cases are diagnosed a year. (4) History Hughlings Jackson believed that epilepsy was a grey matter disease and that seizures were responses to “exteroceptive phenomena”(7). In second century A.D., Galen wrote of the same causes. The physiologist Brown-Sequard basically said that the CNS had an elevated excitability. Finally, in the 20th century Italian physiologists experimented on animals to find neuronal irritability. In 1950, when few treatments were available for a disease they knew next to nothing about, Wilder Penfield discovered hie “Montreal Procedure” named after the location he was in. This procedure made him the first to use direct brain stimulation as a way of finding neurological damage during surgery. He also discovered a connection between temporal lobe epilepsy and experiences of heightened spirituality, maybe uncovering the biological reasoning behind some of the most seizures, epilepsy, patients, cause, brain, seizure, partial, children, person, types, type, medications, two, tonic, one, occur, nerve, myoclonic, found, first, during, been, treatment, sometimes, side, lobe, generalized, drugs, doctors, caused, because, surgery, researchers, procedure, patient