17 August 2007

Absence seizures

Ini lah penyakit Amani. Salah satu katogeri sawan....

Absence seizures are generalised seizures, affecting both sides of the brain at once. However, they do not affect the entire brain. This type of seizure usually affects children, most commonly beginning between the ages of six and 12. It is very rare in adults.

During an absence seizure the child stops what they are doing, loses awareness of their surroundings and stares. It can appear to onlookers that they are daydreaming or switching off. However, the child cannot be alerted or woken up, because they are momentarily unconscious.
Around half of children who have absences may also display other symptoms during the seizure, such as smacking their lips, chewing, swallowing repeatedly or fiddling with their clothes. Their eyelids may also flicker slightly.


When an absence is over, the child is unlikely to be aware of what has happened, but may have the feeling that they have ‘missed' something. Most children do not feel tired or ill after this type of seizure.

Absence seizures generally only last for a few seconds. They can happen several times a day. Some children may have hundreds of them during a day, although this is rare. However, if the seizures are very brief they can be difficult to spot.
The old name for absence seizures is petit mal, which roughly translated means small illness. This name makes them sound fairly harmless and, for many, they are little more than an occasional nuisance. However, when absences occur frequently they can make life very confusing.

When absences occur, the child misses out on tiny snippets of information. This can affect their ability to learn and also to understand instructions. For example, they might hear the first part of a sentence but not the end, so they hear the instruction to go out and play but not the instruction to be back in ten minutes. When they do not return as requested, this can be easily misinterpreted as misbehaviour.

Therefore, it is not unusual for parents and teachers to lose patience with the child unless it becomes obvious that something more serious is causing this behaviour.
Most absence seizures respond well to
anti-epileptic drug treatment, usually sodium valproate or ethosuximide. Sometimes lamotrigine can be effective. The majority of children with typical absence seizures will grow out of them by puberty. Some children may go on to experience tonic-clonic seizures later in life.

Like many
generalised seizures, doctors can rarely say why a child develops absences, although between 25 and 40 per cent of children with absences have relatives who have experienced similar seizures.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home