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Seizures don't necessarily mean you have epilepsy
Not all seizures are associated with epilepsy—in fact, having a high fever or low blood sugar can trigger a seizure event, as can stress or lack of sleep in people who are predisposed to having seizures. So, how then is an epilepsy diagnosis made?
“It can be challenging [to diagnose epilepsy]," Dresser says. "You really have to rely heavily on what the patient can tell you or, a lot of times, what bystanders can tell you happened to the person: what the symptoms were, what they experienced, what people saw and what happened after the seizure.”
Neurologists use many different tools to determine where a person is experiencing seizures due to epilepsy. In addition to using computerized tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to take pictures of the brain, they also use an electroencephalogram (EEG) to check electrical activity. Patients with seizures disorders will most likely have disrupted brain activity that can be detected on an EEG.
Research suggests those with epilepsy have brains that are physically different from those without the disease. For a 2018 study published in the journal Brain, authors analyzed brain MRIs of 2,149 people with epilepsy from all over the world. They found patients frequently had reduced thickness and volume of gray matter in key areas. More research is needed, but understanding these variations could be crucial to future treatment of the disorder.