Tolchin and his research team called participants to follow up. In the study, 105 people diagnosed with PNES were referred to receive psychotherapy. Tolchin published a study in the journal Neurology that looked at the effectiveness of psychotherapy on patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. “We think it’s like having a really extreme stress response,” says Benjamin Tolchin, MD, MS, a neurologist at Yale Medicine. But the exact mechanism that leads to this type of seizure is unknown. So, what causes non-epileptic seizures? Current research suggests that psychogenic non-epileptic seizures can be triggered by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other abnormally high levels of stress. But the problem is, seizures are not caused by an abnormality in the brain (the way they are with epilepsy). In extreme cases, patients with PNES, who have not been helped by medications, have undergone unnecessary surgery in an attempt at a cure. For this reason, traditional epilepsy treatments, such as anti-seizure medications, don’t work and can even introduce harmful side effects for these patients. These seizures can look and feel the same as epileptic seizures, but people with PNES are not experiencing the same electrical overload in their brains. These patients are actually having a different kind of seizure known as a “psychogenic non-epileptic seizure” or PNES. Seizures caused by epilepsy overwhelm the brain with electronic messages, which is what causes the person to move uncontrollably or to see, hear, and feel things they normally wouldn’t.īut recent research suggests that about 10 percent of patients previously diagnosed with epilepsy don’t have epilepsy at all. If a healthy brain functions like a well-conducted orchestra, with each instrument playing its part at the right time, a brain during an epileptic seizure functions more like a chaotic musical mishmash, where every instrument plays at once, without regard for any of the others around it. During an epileptic seizure, the brain, which normally operates in an orderly way by sending electrical messages from neuron to neuron, becomes overloaded. When someone collapses to the floor, back arching, arms and legs thrashing, your first thought may be epileptic seizure.Īnd you wouldn’t be alone-until recently, most doctors thought the same thing.
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