Epilepsy in children
Epilepsy is the most common childhood brain disorder in the United States. Nearly 3 million people have been diagnosed with this disease, while 450,000 of them are under the age of 17. Fortunately, two thirds of the child population will overcome the side effects, most notably, seizures, in teenage-hood through treatment. Epilepsy affects all ages groups. But for children, a variety of issues exist that can affect one's childhood.
Seizures are defined as 'a transient occurrence of signs and symptoms due to the abnormal, excessive, or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain characterized by abrupt and involuntary skeletal muscles activity.' A doctor will most often diagnose a child with epilepsy, also known as seizure disorder, if the child has one or more seizures, if the doctor thinks they could have another one, and if their seizures aren't caused by another medical condition.
Some epilepsy ends after childhood. Some forms of epilepsy are associated only with conditions of childhood that cease once a child grows up. Approximately 70% of children who have epilepsy during their childhood eventually outgrow it. There are also some seizures, such as febrile seizures, that are one-time occurrences during childhood, and they do not result in permanent epilepsy.
Pediatric epilepsy may cause changes in the development of the brain. For this reason, epilepsy in children is vastly distinct from epilepsy in adults and they must be considered differently in most regards.
Presentation
DiagnosisIn 2014 the International League Against Epilepsy Task Force proposed the operational clinical definition of epilepsy, intended as a disease of the brain defined by any of the following conditions:
- At least two unprovoked seizures occurring >24 h apart.
- One unprovoked seizure and a probability of further seizures similar to the general recurrence risk after two unprovoked seizures, occurring over the next 10 years.
- Diagnosis of an epilepsy syndrome.
The most common causes of SE in children are fever and infections of the CNS, or Central Nervous System. Other causes can be genetic and metabolic disorders, abnormalities of the CNS, ingestion of toxic elements, and Hyponatremia.
Education
Epilepsy can affect a child's education, thereby leading to trouble learning and lower grades. While many children are capable of functioning in a normal classroom environment,many end up in special education.
The child may be forced to miss a lot of school due to seizures. The seizures can impair a child's ability to memorize learning materials.
Tonic-clonic seizures can have a serious impact on education due to the memory loss they cause, and the time needed to recover following the seizure-causing there to be missed time in school.
Absence seizures can have a high negative impact on a child's education. As they are less obvious than tonic-clonic seizures, they can occur many times within a single day, thereby resulting in the child's ability to learn being impaired, and leading to low grades. Often, these educational deficits lead to the investigation of neurological conditions and result in the diagnosis of this seizure subtype. Children may appear to be 'zoning out' or day-dreaming during classes when in actuality they are experiencing uncontrolled absent seizures. Once treatment begins, these children often exhibit improved attention and their grades improve.
When seizures are controlled by medication, many anticonvulsants have side effects that include drowsiness, thereby also impacting a child's education.
The high school graduation rate has been reported at 64%, compared with an overall national average of 82%.
Social
It is very difficult for a child to struggle through the constraints of epilepsy. They cannot live the same carefree life that they may watch their friends living, but that does not mean their quality of life is any less. The diagnosis of SE is not a fatal or life-ending one, especially for a child. A child with Epilepsy must be much more wary of their surroundings at all time as well as being in communication with their own physical well-being. The social stigma of epilepsy may stand in the way, as the child is more prone to bullying. But as the child learns to manage the diagnosis, it may become a more conventionally normal life for them.Many children with epilepsy are overprotected by their parents, who put restrictions on them in the name of safety, requiring more adult supervision than other children, and not allowing them to participate in certain activities normal to the age group, such as sports. It is a subject of debate if a child with controlled seizures needs additional protection or restrictions, or if the benefits outweigh the losses a child would face.
Language
In cases of chronic pediatric epilepsy there is often an association with reduced language skills. The classically understood language areas of the brain are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Realistically, language is significantly more complex and involves several cortical areas beyond these regions.Language deficits may present with a wide variety of symptoms ranging from odd patterns of speech to complete aphasia of speech. Unfortunately there is not a significant amount of data that parses out how an epileptic firing patterns will cause a resulting language deficit. The correlation of epileptic activity and language deficit is undeniably present, but the mechanisms involved have yet to be unraveled.
In the developing brain, epilepsy may cause the language areas to be structurally altered leading to developmental difficulties. In turn, a child may have trouble acquiring communication skills at a normal rate. This delay may in some children be resolved by compensatory mechanisms or alleviated by medication and therapy, but in some children with persistent epilepsy, the delay may remain or worsen as they age.
In the case of temporal lobe epilepsy, studies have shown that there is structural compromise to the fiber tracts associated with memory and language, providing some explanation for the impairments in patients with epilepsy.
Language abilities in pediatric epilepsy cases are evaluated using electrical cortical stimulation language mapping, electrocorticography, fMRI, Wada testing, and magnetoencephalography.
fMRI has been shown to offer a promising strategy for defining language activation patterns as well as laterization patterns.
It is important to identify language regions involved in epilepsy, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy, before surgical resection in order to reduce the risk of postoperative language deficits. Currently, ECS mapping is the standard of care in localization of areas involved in focal seizure onset and pre surgical planning.
Many pediatric and adult epilepsy patients develop atypical language lateralization due to the reorganization of connections in the epileptic brain. There have been documented cases of interhemispheric and intrahemispheric reorganization of language areas. Several factors may be involved in the extent to which reorganization occurs.
"Table 1: Variables Associated With Interhemispheric and Intrahemispheric Reorganization Found in fMRI and ECS Studies."
| Variable | Effect on Language Organization | Interhemispheric/Intrahemispheric/Both |
| Early age of seizure onset | Yes | Both |
| Left-sided seizure focus | Yes | Both |
| Left-handedness | Yes | Both |
| Cortical dysplasia | Yes | Intrahemispheric |
| Lower IQ scores | Yes | Intrahemispheric |
| Gender | No | |
| Age at mapping | No | |
| Treatment with antiepileptic medications | No | |
| Ictal zone location | No | |
| Duration of epilepsy | No | |
| Seizure frequency | No | |
| Seizure propagation patterns | No |
The effects of epilepsy on language may be impacted by location of epileptiform activity, severity and duration of electrical discharges, age of onset, treatment method, and surgical resection areas.
In some cases, language impairment may be the first indicator of epileptiform activity in the brain of children. A study done at the University of Gothenburg showed that language impairments were more common in children with epileptic brain activity than children without. They then investigated whether the epileptic activity was the cause of the language deficit or whether there were other factors involved. They found the greatest impairments in language in the children with misfiring on the left side of the brain, the side that controls linguistic abilities. This likely indicates that epileptic activity leads to language difficulties and suggests that in children with language impairments of unknown etiology, evaluations for epilepsy should be considered.
Causes
The causes of epilepsy in childhood vary. In about ⅔ of cases, it is unknown.- Unknown 67.6%
- Congenital 20%
- Trauma 4.7%
- Infection 4%
- Stroke 1.5%
- Tumor 1.5%
- Degenerative.7%
Treatment
Medicating a child is not always easy. Many pills are made only to be swallowed, which can be difficult for a child. For some medications, chewable versions do exist.
The ketogenic diet is used to treat children who have not responded successfully to other treatments. This diet is low in carbohydrates, adequate in protein and high in fat. It has proven successful in two thirds of epilepsy cases.
In some cases, severe epilepsy is treated with the hemispherectomy, a drastic surgical procedure in which part or all of one of the hemispheres of the brain is removed.