Question
A five-year-old girl has been experiencing twitching symptoms for nearly a month, with the intervals between her last three twitching episodes being eight days. During the twitches, she remains conscious, and the twitches can be immediately stopped and normalcy restored with loud shouting from others. There is no vomiting during the twitching, and her jaw trembles. Is this a symptom of epilepsy? How should it be handled?
Answer
Twitches are not always caused by epilepsy; children experiencing twitching may have other underlying causes. Firstly, we need to understand what twitching is. Twitching refers to involuntary muscle movements, a pathological feature of neurological and muscular diseases, characterized by non-conscious contractions of striated muscles. Clinically, there are various manifestations, including convulsions, tonic-clonic seizures, myoclonus, tremors, and choreoathetotic movements. Twitching is one of the main symptoms of epilepsy but is not exclusive to epilepsy. Other diseases can also cause twitching, such as hysterical twitching, hypocalcemic twitching, and hypoglycemic spasms. Moreover, some types of epilepsy do not present with twitching symptoms, such as absence seizures and temporal lobe epilepsy. Therefore, twitching should not be equated with epilepsy. In children, the forms of twitching are diverse…