Epilepsy And Pregnancy: Everything You Need To Know
Having epilepsy and continuing with a pregnancy is a situation that happens in 3 out of every 1,000 cases. It is not the most frequent, but it cannot be said that they are a marginal number of cases.
Fortunately, epileptic seizures are not increased by the fetus, nor are there alterations in most babies born to mothers with the condition. Up to 96% reach term with a normal delivery, without complications.
What happens in a pregnancy of a woman with epilepsy?
Epilepsy is defined as a neurological disease in which the person suffers synchronous and massive discharges from their neurons. That is, the electrical activity of nerve cells happens at the same time in large areas of the brain.
This may or may not translate into seizures. There is a difference between epileptic seizures and a seizure state. They do not always go hand in hand, although in popular thought they do. In any case, electric shock is always expressed with some symptom, which can be an absence or a small localized movement.
When going through a pregnancy, the female body changes due to the action of hormones, especially progesterone. There are modifications in the genital, reproductive, cardiac and soft tissues in general. We could say that almost all cells are affected, in one way or another.
No significant increase or decrease in seizures during pregnancy has been recorded. Epidemiological studies in this regard conclude that this type of influence cannot be attributed to the fetus.
In any case, when the pregnant woman’s sleep is not adequate, due to insomnia, more severe problems have been recorded. In general, seizures increase if the lack of sleep is focused in the last trimester. However, it is not known for sure if the final culprit is poor rest, stress or the hormonal factor as such.
However, there are problems with the concentration of drugs used to treat epilepsy. Remember that women with epilepsy who are pregnant are already medicated, and pregnancy modifies the total volume of circulating blood, as well as its distribution in body tissues.
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