Helping a Loved One with Seizures

The brain, spinal cord, and the connective nerves of your nervous system help with many tasks, including sensation, thought, movement, and even digestion. Your neurons are the messengers that transmit this information in the complex network, consisting of only a cell body, dendrites, and an axon.

These essential cells fire as many as 200 times per second, and transmission can reach speeds of up to 120 meters per second. When neurons send signals faster than normal, they can build up electrical activity and cause problems like seizures. 

This can occur in a number of different ways and for multiple reasons, but if you have a friend or loved one who lives with this problem, knowing how to help deal with seizures can be incredibly important. 

Our medical staff at Riverhills Neuroscience is here to help the residents of Norwood, Anderson, and Westside, Ohio, and Crestview Hills, Kentucky, with seizures and other neurological conditions.

Understanding seizures

These events result from changes in the brain’s electrical activity and can lead to changes in behavior, movement, emotions, and level of consciousness. What you experience during a seizure varies depending on where it starts in your brain. Symptoms can include short-term confusion, staring spells, jerking movements, and loss of consciousness.

The type of seizure and the severity of the event can determine medical need; seizures lasting between 30 seconds and two minutes mean informing your doctor as soon as you can, and those lasting more than five minutes are a medical emergency.

Causes and types of seizures

Epilepsy, a chronic neurological disorder where seizures are common, leads to events without an easily determined underlying cause. While most people associate this illness with it, you can have seizures for several other reasons and in different types:

• Diabetes: a hyperglycemic condition that can have lasting effects throughout the body through blood vessel damage

• Cerebrovascular disease: a range of conditions that affect blood flow to the brain, including aneurysms, stroke, and carotid artery disease (CAD)

• Congenital abnormalities: issues with brain development from birth

• Eclampsia: a seizure that happens during pregnancy

• Infections: meningitis, sepsis, or encephalitis are infections that can cause seizures

Seizures occur in one of two main types: generalized, where increased electrical activity happens on both sides of the brain simultaneously, or focal, where this activity occurs on one side. Generalized seizures include absence, atonic, clonic, tonic, and tonic-clonic, and the focal types include simple and complex partial seizures.

How to help someone during a seizure

When a seizure happens, follow these important steps:

Remain calm

Panicking will worsen the situation for the person dealing with the seizure and make you incapable of helping them through it.

Time the seizure

Document how long the seizure lasts, as those lasting more than five minutes may require emergency help.

Remove harmful objects

To prevent the person from harming themselves during the event, clear anything that could cause accidental harm.

Avoid moving them

Don’t make any efforts to control their movements, put anything in their mouths, or move them in any way unless they’re located in someplace that poses a major risk, like on the road or close to water.

Stay with them until it’s over

Let the event happen in as safe an environment as possible, and when they’ve regained consciousness or normal movement, let them know what happened and check for injuries.

Seizures are rarely a serious health hazard, but if someone you love experiences one, help them through the experience and make sure they get the help they need. Contact the Riverhills Neuroscience team today to get treated after a seizure.