seizures

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So someone posted an article and in it it said 25% of people with ASD's develop seizures during puberty and that signs such as self-injury and "regression" or "getting worse" might be the cause of developing seizures.

I'm wondering how many people here have seizures or ever considered it etc and what type etc. Basically anything to do with seizures especially correlating with ASD-- I'm curious.

I'm pretty sure i have mild seizures at night. Everything will go really bright and colourful for a short time, this can happen 2 or 3 times a night. This started just before i started secondary school, i don't think it affected by behaviour though.

I only started having seizures when I was on Gabapentin last spring. Now though, they won't go away, and I quit that stuff. At least off of it it's little blackouts and my head feels tingly, on the pills it was full blown shaking twitching everything. My god the sore muscles.

Funny thing is, they didn't even give me the pills for seizures. I had them for neuropathy. Lyrica are much better, even kill the little seizures. Self dosing is a pain in the ass.

Never had seizures, not a one.

Vanilla_Slice

My husband, who has ASD, developed grand mal seizures when he was 14. We are pretty sure that he must have also had absence seizures when younger that went unnoticed. He has had every kind of seizure.

I know lots of ASD people who have seizures.

I've had seizures since I was two, and I'm pretty sure I've had Asperger's for most of my life, if not all of it.

will meltdowns be counted as seizure for me meltdowns are mostly headbanging

Have had grand mal [tonic clonic] epilepsy from toddler age till current,in unstable severity,am also paralysed from the waist down for up to a day after a seizure [and get the same problem from strong sensory overload] but had not had that post seizure/overload effect from the start-not to the severity it is now anyway.
Am have had regressions but not autism related,these related to learning,and would wipe out entire school type skills but these were already very weak anyway.
Last one that had was around/after twenty,but have not had another since then.

Every autie have lived with have had some form of epilepsy.
One thing with being eppie as well is not all seizures may be epileptic,'fake seizures' [cant remember the proper name for it, and not fake as in....not real? faked?] but they're not epilepsy caused as they dont show on the EEG,am have these as well,and recover from them better/quicker but for self they're the same in every other way,they are also helped by the epilepsy medication am take.

I usually think of shutdown/meltdown as my catatonic episodes as opposed to my seizures. A typical seizure for me would come about from sensory stimulus. Like one day I was walking out of my bedroom and when I opened my door the bottom of the door brushes across the top of my small toe on my right foot and I felt the sensation shoot from my toe up the entire right side of my body and the next thing I knew I was getting up off the floor, and anytime I thought about what just happened I started blacking out again. Even just describing it right now I can 'feel' the memory of the sensation and it puts a hitch in my giddy up if you follow my meaning.

I don't have seizures and never had any.

Meltdowns are not by definition seizures, but particular sorts of meltdowns can be a sign that seizure activity might be going on. If your meltdowns may occur at random, without anything provoking them, and if your behavior during a meltdown appears purposeless and stereotyped, you may get a neurologist to check you out for seizures. However, the belief that is popular in some autism circles (including some research circles) that aggression is a common feature of seizures, is not correct.

i think i do, what do they feel like?

[i]

It depends. There are many different types of seizures. Since I myself do not have seizures, I cannot tell what a seizure feels like to the person experiencing one, but each different type of seizure causes different symptoms. For example, people who have grand mal seizures often lose consciousness and cannot control their body (eg. they may become incontinent). If you have absence seizures on the other hand, you will just black out for a while and it may look like you're day-dreaming. There are many other forms of seizures and I don't even know all of them.

If I may ask, why do you believe you have seizures? If you have symptoms that could indicate a seizure, a neurologist may evaluate you. They will usually run an EEG to check for abnormalities, but your clinical signs and symptoms are more important in diangosis than the EEG results (some peopl e have EEG abnormalities with no symptoms and others have seizures but they can't be caught on EEG).

I don't know what they feel like, as I can't remember, but I know what it feels like afterwards. I can't move, I hurt everywhere, and I'm sensitive to everything. Light, sound, smell, everything.

Psychogenic seizures?

I got up, got dizzy and fell over. I knew I was moving involuntarily (possibly quite violently) but was quite blank minded. Then I remember thinking I was waking up from a nap, then slowly remembering a little. I have no idea how long I was out for.
That was my only experience like that. I was 16.

I think that what I have are simple partial seizures. I have never passed out - or even stopped generally functioning - through one. It's more like a strange change in perception; feeling as if things are closer than they are, suddenly feeling 'lost' in a familiar place as if it's unfamiliar. My hands go numb for some reason.

I had these from the age of around 4 to 8 (although I could easily have had them from birth, I don't know. 4 is just when I can personally remember having them), then they stopped for some years, then started again when I was around 19.

I noticed that when I was on antidepressants they became a lot more frequent, and one of the side effects of some is that they can aggravate seizures.

Last edited by Hovis on 16 Jul 2009, 2:01 am, edited 1 time in total.