a walk thru of epilepsy diagnoses?

[Dialysiswife]

coyld someone tell me how they check u for epilepsy? mri? do u have to see a neuro first?

 

[masterjen]

It is highly recommended that you see a neurologist, and preferably an epileptologist (a neurologist who specializes in epilepsy). They will want a careful description of your seizures, and the specialists like eye-witness accounts of the seizures as well as your description of what happens and how you feel before, during and after a seizure. Keep careful track of how often they occur, describe each type if you have more than one (they don't expect you to know what the types are called), as well any triggers you have identified.

MRIs and EEGs are performed as part of the diagnosis, but in the event these are normal, an epileptologist can sometimes provide a diagnosis based on careful descriptions alone.


The first EEG is typically an hour or so long, and if this is abnormal it can be helpful but many people require longer EEGs because many EEGs are not abnormal unless a person is having a seizure. Even then the EEG can be normal depending on where in the brain the seizures are coming from.

 

[MrsBerry]

In my husband's case, the ER doctor told him to go home and rest after the first seizure - that sometimes a person will have a seizure and never have another one. 7 hours to the minute later, he had another seizure and back to the ER we went. Because we live in a tiny mountain town, our hospital didn't have the right equipment to look into his head (he had a CAT scan done, and it came back normal), they sent us to the next "big town" over that had a hospital with an MRI machine. The MRI showed he had what his first neurologist called an AVM. Then she retired and his new neurologist suggested we go to Emory University in ATL to see what they would do (the new neurologist had only dealt with 2 AVM patients in his 25 years of doctoring). After a cerebral angiogram was done, it was determined that the cause of his seizures is a cavernoma in his left temporal lobe. We have been doing the dance of finding the right dosage for my husband since January of 2011 because he keeps having seizures. Surgery is out of the question because of how deep into his brain the cavernoma goes, and also the location. It took us 3 years to get a proper diagnosis, and 100s of seizures to get to where we are today. It is a long and grueling process for everyone involved.