Q&A With Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s Deborah Holder, MD
Parents often miss the signs that their child has epilepsy, according to Deborah Holder, MD, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s and a pediatric epilepsy expert.
“Every day in clinic I see children who have had for years what many people call ‘funny spells,’” Holder said. “Sometimes I start talking to a parent and find out the parent has had ‘funny spells’ for years, but had no idea they were epileptic seizures.”
That’s because many people with epilepsy experience subtle symptoms, such as not being able to talk for a few seconds, Holder said. When the momentary symptoms disappear, people tend to forget to look for the source.
“Sometimes children experiencing seizures will see flashing lights or have temporary blurred vision, which leads them being misdiagnosed with migraine,” Holder said.
About 1 in 26 Americans are thought to have epilepsy, a neurologic condition in which a person experiences seizures, or episodes of abnormal electrical activity in the brain.
To mark National Epilepsy Awareness Month, Holder spoke with the Cedars-Sinai Newsroom about what seizures can look like—and why it is important that children get help as soon as possible.
What does a seizure look like?
A seizure can look like anything, depending on where in the brain the seizure comes from. A lot of people think a seizure is a convulsive seizure, where there’s a loss of consciousness and the person falls down to the ground and the whole body experiences convulsive activity. That’s actually the rarest type of seizure.
The most common seizures are barely noticeable. Sometimes a patient will just sit and stare and be unresponsive for three or four seconds. A child may have an uncontrollable motor activity, such as twitching of an arm or one leg or twitching of one side of the face that lasts for 30 seconds.
Patients may get a feeling of numbness or tingling in a part of the body, or get a funny smell or taste in the mouth that