Do Seizures Cause Brain Damage?

Brain Tegan Parry

Structural Changes That May Occur in the Brain

A research group in 2018 investigated structural changes in the brains of people that have epilepsy. To do this, they pooled data from 24 different research centers around the world.

Used data included the MRI brain scans of 2,159 individuals with different types of epilepsy in comparison with the brain scans of 1,727 healthy individuals. Researchers discovered that there was shared reduction in gray matter across all the different types of epilepsy scans.

It was also observed that there were some structural changes that were specific to certain types of epilepsy. For example, it was common in people with temporal lobe epilepsy to have a reduced volume of the hippocampus [5], which is the area associated with the memory in the brain.

The researchers also identified that there were some limitations to their study, such as:

That can’t be certain that the structural changes were present from the beginning of the person’s epilepsy or if they occurred due to seizures.
They could not separate out other factors that could have contributed to the structural changes, such as seizures, frequency, the severity, or side effects of the antiseizure medications.
The result of the MRI scans may have been affected since the different research centers nay have used different scanning protocols.

Tegan Parry June 28, 2022

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