Epilepsy is a neurological condition characterised by repeated seizures. Seizures are caused by electrical activity in the brain, although may appear differently from person to person (not all seizures involve convulsions, despite what you might think).
As with many conditions there is not a single cause that can be identified as a precursor to epilepsy. Genetics (a mutation in the KCNC1 gene has recently been identified as a cause of a progressive inherited form of epilepsy – Muona et al 2015), brain tumours, or head injuries, and the cause of many patients’ epilepsy remains unknown. Several studies have shown that you are more likely to develop epilepsy after a head injury e.g. Christensen et al (2009) found that people were 2% more likely to develop epilepsy after a mild head injury. This rose to 7% more likely following a severe head injury, with risk also increasing slightly with age.
The image below is taken from the EFEPA and shows what to do if someone is having a seizure:
As mentioned earlier there are different types of epileptic seizures which depends on which part of the brain they originate in. Seizures can be classified by how much of the brain is affected: partial/focal seizures (when only a small part of the brain is affected) or generalised (if most of the brain, or all of it, it affected).
Focal seizures can also originate in different parts of the brain, with the temporal lobe being the most comment (epilepsy.com). The temporal lobe is the part of the brain above your ear, and is responsible for processing hearing, and our memories (this is simplified – it does a bit more than this!). Therefore, one of the common features of temporal lobe epilepsy is memory disturbances (Ko et al, 2013). The famous patient H.M.’s amnesia was caused by an operation to remove the source of his severe temporal epilepsy – this was carried out in the 50s before brain functions were accurately known and too much of the medial temporal lobe was taken away. This destroyed part of the hippocampus, the structure in the brain responsible for memory processing. Due to the nature of his amnesia, he was probably one of the most studied individuals ever in psychology. See this post for more on H.M. and memory research. Operations are carried out to remove part of the temporal lobe in patients now with much better outcomes!
The second most common is frontal lobe epilepsy, where seizures originate in the front part of the brain. They often occur during sleep, and can affect the motor areas of the brain, leading to problems with motor skills (e.g. Beleza & Pinho, 2011). If patients are not eligible for surgery to remove the specific part of the brain responsible for the seizures, anti-convulsive medication and electrical brain stimulation can be helpful in reducing symptoms (Kellinghaus & Luders, 2004).