What causes a seizure?

What causes a seizure?

Charles Ribak, Ph.D. (Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, UC Irvine School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: What causes a seizure?; If I had a seizure, do I have epilepsy?; Are people with epilepsy more creative? and more...

There are many causes of seizures. There are seizures caused by a loud noise, for example; this is called audiogenic. I worked on a sample of rats that had audiogenic seizures. Bright lights sometimes will set off another type of seizure. This is called photosensitive epilepsy. There are stress-induced seizures. Sometimes we don't know what induces seizures. Sometimes when we are monitoring a patient in the hospital for epilepsy, we're monitoring them for 24 hours and we don't know what is triggering their seizures. So, there are certain types of epilepsy where we know what triggers the seizure and there are others where we don't know.