Epilepsy in Children

Watching your child have his or her first seizure was probably one of the most frightening moments of your life. Finding out that your child has epilepsy may have been another one. The future may suddenly seem terrifying and uncertain for both your child and your whole family. But as you may already know, the news is not nearly as bad as it sounds. Here are some things to keep in mind if your child has epilepsy:

"We don't have a cure for epilepsy, and unfortunately treating seizures is just about controlling them," says William R. Turk, MD, Chief of the Neurology Division at the Nemours Children's' Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. "But in children, that may be all you need. If you can buy them some time with medication, the seizures may very well go away on their own."

About 400,000 children in the U.S. have epilepsy, and most of them are able to control their seizures and lead normal lives.

That's not to say that dealing with epilepsy is easy, and it will almost certainly change your family. As a parent of a child with epilepsy, you'll have new responsibilities. Obviously, you'll need to make sure that your child is getting good medical care, but there's more to it than that.

You'll have to make sure that your child takes medications, and learns how to avoid triggers of seizures. You may also have to become an advocate for your child, explaining epilepsy to family, friends, and teachers who may not understand the condition or be frightened by it.

So while it may be tough being the parent of a child with epilepsy sometimes, just remember that treatment works. Epilepsy is not nearly as scary as it sounds.

"With treatment, a child with epilepsy should have a pretty normal life with very few limitations," says Solomon L. Moshe, MD, Director of Clinical Neurophysiology and Child Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

Defining Epilepsy

Turk and Moshe stress that epilepsy isn't a single disease. Instead, it's a blanket term: a person who has epilepsy has seizures, but the cause and the type of those seizures can be very different. As an analogy, Turk notes that while prostate and breast cancer are both cancers, the causes, development and treatment of those conditions is not the same. There are many different types of epilepsy and they may require different treatments. "We're learning also that epilepsy in children is a very different beast than epilepsy in the elderly, or epilepsy in women," Turk says. "The condition can't be treated by a one size fits all approach."

Likewise, the impact of epilepsy is a lot more complicated than the results of the medical condition.

"In treating epilepsy, you're not just treating the seizures," says Turk. "You're also dealing with the psychological and cognitive effects of the condition, and the impact on the whole family." A doctor who is just writing prescriptions, Turk says, is not really treating the whole condition.

The first thing that you and your doctor must do is stop the seizures, usually with medication. Fortunately, there are many effective epilepsy drugs available.