Question
What are the factors or causes of epilepsy?
Answer
Common causes of epilepsy include:
- Congenital malformations: such as chromosomal abnormalities, congenital hydrocephalus, microcephaly, incomplete corpus callosum, incomplete cortical development, and others.
- Prenatal and perinatal diseases: Birth injuries are common causes of symptomatic infantile spasms.
- Post-hypertensive sequelae following high fever convulsions: Severe and persistent high fever convulsions can lead to brain damage including neuronal loss and gliosis, primarily in the medial surface of the temporal lobe, especially in the hippocampus. 4.Brain injury: Post-traumatic epilepsy following brain injury may be accompanied by depressed fractures, dura mater tears, and regional neurological symptoms, leading to long-term memory impairment.
- Infections: Seen in various bacterial meningitis, brain abscesses, granulomas, viral encephalitis, and parasitic diseases such as cysticercosis, schistosomiasis, and toxoplasmosis.
- Poisoning: Lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, alcohol, atropine, isoniazid poisoning, and systemic diseases such as preeclampsia syndrome and uremia can all cause epilepsy.
- Intracranial tumors
- Cerebrovascular diseases: Besides cerebrovascular anomalies and subarachnoid hemorrhage leading to epilepsy at a younger age, post-stroke epilepsy is more common in middle-aged and elderly individuals, especially with cerebral embolism, cerebral thrombosis, and multiple lacunar recurrence. Hypertensive encephalopathy also often accompanies epilepsy.
- Nutritional and metabolic diseases: Rickets often occurs with epilepsy in children. In adults, hypoglycemia due to insulinoma, diabetes mellitus, hyperthyroidism, hypoparathyroidism, vitamin B6 deficiency, and other systemic diseases can all lead to epilepsy.