Epilepsy and Alcohol: Triggers and Safe Drinking

An alcohol-related seizure may result in your inability to control your actions, which could be dangerous. You could develop status epilepticus, which is multiple seizures, or prolonged seizures, and can lead to permanent brain damage or death. Independent predictors for alcohol consumption within the last 12 months. Alcohol consumption usually represents a taboo in the doctor-patient relationship and questions on the smoking status are answered more easily. Therefore, subjects were first queried about nicotine consumption and only later asked to give details on alcohol use.

1. Other seizures in alcohol-dependent individuals may be due to concurrent metabolic, toxic, infectious, traumatic, neoplastic and cerebrovascular diseases and are frequently partial-onset seizures.
2. Several treatment options and interventions can help a person recover from alcohol dependence.
3. You may be alcohol dependent if you have a strong desire to drink and find it hard to control your drinking.

His hobbies include physical fitness, reading, and social entrepreneurship. Those who are exposed to it during pregnancy can go on to suffer from a wide range of difficulties from physical to mental and emotional. Amongst these lifelong implications is an increased risk of alcohol-induced seizures. The aim is to do a review of the literature on alcohol withdrawal and the onset of seizures in individuals with alcohol addiction. They usually appear within 48 hours after abrupt cessation, and are characterized by a reduction in seizure threshold secondary to adaptation to alcohol. More than 50% of individuals will experience a new seizure and in 5% of these cases, progression to a sustained epilepticus status can occur.

Associated Data

For those that may already be suffering from the emotional effects of alcohol, it will be important to know more about the alcoholic seizures. Seizures are what happens when there is a problem in the brain resulting in excess of electrical activity. Most cases where patients are seen to suffer an alcohol-induced seizure are due to massive over-use such as binge drinking. Convulsions can be brought on by either drinking heavily or withdrawal from heavy drinking. In the study population, generalized genetic epilepsy was an independent predictor for the occurrence of alcohol-related seizures. The mean alcohol intake prior to alcohol-related seizures was not higher in patients with generalized genetic epilepsy than in subjects with focal epilepsy.

This is when a seizure lasts longer than 5 minutes, and is a medical emergency. Drinking small amounts of alcohol is unlikely to make https://soberhome.net/ you have more seizures. But heavy drinking over a short space of time (binge drinking) can make you more likely to have a seizure.

Furthermore, we cannot exclude hypoglycemic episodes caused by acute heavy alcohol consumption (26), which may have contributed to the manifestation of epileptic seizures (27). If you think you may be alcohol dependent and want to stop drinking, it’s important to get medical advice about how to stop safely. This is to reduce the risk of seizures and other symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Heavy alcohol use can lead to seizures, especially when you stop drinking and start to enter a period of withdrawal.

In this study, we aimed to systematically analyze alcohol drinking and the occurrence of alcohol-related seizures in 310 epilepsy patients. Even though alcohol use may trigger seizures, 65% of interviewed subjects had consumed alcohol within the last 12 months and every third patient had consumed alcohol within the last 7 days. Our results are in line with previous population-based study findings from Canada reporting a 12-month prevalence of alcohol use in patients with epilepsy of 57.6% (20). Regarding chronic heavy alcohol consumption, our cohort of patients had used alcohol far more responsibly than the general adult German population.

Alcohol withdrawal seizures (delirium tremens) occur when the body undergoes severe and unexpected nervous system changes after an alcohol-dependent person stops drinking. Alcohol-related seizures can happen when people are acutely intoxicated. It can also occur when an alcoholic suddenly stops drinking and experiences alcohol withdrawal. In multivariate analysis, alcohol consumption within the last 12 months was independently related to AED monotherapy. It is highly likely that subjects with well-controlled epilepsies on monotherapy are more likely to consume alcoholic beverages than those with difficult-to-treat variants.

Data collection using a standardized questionnaire, interview situations, and interview techniques

Physicians’ advice that “a light alcohol intake is harmless” was identified as an additional predictor for alcohol use. Patients with epilepsy may feel unsure about alcohol consumption on chronic medication and therefore may be willing to follow physicians’ advices more often. Statistical analyses were calculated using IBM SPSS statistics 24.0. Over 50% of alcohol withdrawal seizures may relate to additional risk factors, such as preexisting epilepsy, structural brain lesions, or drug use.

Can alcohol trigger seizures in epilepsy?

These include effects on calcium and chloride flux through the ion-gated glutamate NMDA and GABA receptors. During prolonged intoxication, the CNS adapts to the effects of alcohol, resulting in tolerance; however, these adaptive effects seem to be transient, disappearing after alcohol intake is stopped. Although the relationship of seizures to alcohol use is likely to be dose dependent and causal, the available clinical data do not suggest that alcohol use results in seizure genesis. However, a genetic predisposition to alcohol withdrawal seizures is possible.

Alcohol poisoning can lead to seizures, but these may not result from the alcohol intake itself. Lower blood sugar or head trauma caused by a sudden fall could be the underlying cause. Amounts of different alcoholic beverages that correspond to 1 standard drink as defined by the World Health Organization. This illustration has been shown to the participants of this study to guide them in estimating their individual average alcohol intake per drinking occasion. Sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP) is twice as common in people with epilepsy who are also alcohol dependent.

Side Effects of Alcohol Abuse

The authors report that over 90% of alcohol withdrawal seizures occur within 48 hours after the last drink. Heavy drinking, particularly withdrawal from heavy drinking, may trigger seizures in those with epilepsy. Alcohol may also affect anti-seizure medications, which could trigger seizures.

Your chances for recovery depend on how early the disease is diagnosed and how much damage has already occurred. Excessive consumption of alcohol causes alcohol-related neurologic disease. When you consume alcohol, it’s absorbed into your bloodstream from the stomach and the small intestine.