When most people imagine a seizure, they picture someone falling and convulsing. Temporal lobe epilepsy rarely looks like that, particularly not at first. It is the most common form of focal epilepsy in adults, originating in the temporal lobes, the brain regions responsible for memory consolidation, emotional processing, and language. Seizures arising from this area…
A typical seizure lasts between 30 seconds and two minutes and resolves without intervention. When it doesn’t, the clinical situation changes fundamentally. Status epilepticus is defined as a seizure lasting five minutes or longer, or a series of seizures between which the patient does not return to their baseline level of consciousness. At that threshold,…
Some patients arrive at a neurologist’s office having been told by multiple prior providers that their episodes are “not real” or that nothing is neurologically wrong. In most cases, the truth is more nuanced and more treatable: psychogenic nonepileptic seizures are genuine neurological events that look like epilepsy, feel like epilepsy, and are frightening in…
Every summer, someone collapses at a backyard barbecue or a parking lot, and the people around them freeze, not from fear, but from genuine uncertainty. Is it the heat? Is it a stroke? It looks the same in the first seconds, and those seconds matter more than most people realize. Understanding heat stroke vs stroke…
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