Barton Holmes, 2, sits with his father, Kevin Holmes, and his mother, Catherine McEaddy Holmes, during an appointment at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
Barton Holmes was 16 months old when he had his first seizure. "He was convulsing and his eyes were rolling in the back of his head," his mother, Catherine McEaddy Holmes, says. "His lips were blue. I thought he was dying."
The seizure ended in less than a minute. And by the time an ambulance arrived, Barton was back to his old self. Even so, doctors at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where the family lives, kept him overnight while they tried, without success, to figure out what had caused the seizure.
When Barton had a second seizure 10 days later, doctors didn't hesitate. "They were very aggressive and wanted us to start medication immediately," Holmes says. So Barton, who is 2 now, began taking an antiepileptic drug called Keppra.
Barton cuddles with his father while they wait at the hospital.
Barton cuddles with his father while they wait at the hospital.
An aggressive response to a second "unprovoked" seizure is pretty standard these days, says Dr. William Gaillard, who is Barton's doctor and runs the Comprehensive Pediatric Epilepsy Program at Children's. And that's a marked change from the approach of just a few decades ago.
"When I was trained, the general sense was that [seizures] were not necessarily a bad thing," Gaillard says. But a growing body of research shows that even some seizures once thought to be benign can affect the brain, he says, and frequent or prolonged seizures can eventually cause problems with memory and thinking.
So the new mantra in treating childhood epilepsy is "no seizures, no side effects," Gaillard says.
Epileptic seizures are often compared to electrical storms in the brain. They can last for a few seconds or a few minutes and may cause convulsions, a loss of consciousness or just blank staring. More than 300,000 children in the U.S. have epilepsy.
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With Epilepsy Treatment, The Goal Is To Keep Kids Seizure-Free