Alcoholic Seizure: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment

For example, if you have experienced seizures, you may need to participate in inpatient detox supervised by medical professionals rather than detoxing in an outpatient setting. Because alcohol is a depressant, it has a sedating effect on excitatory nerve cells and pathways.5 The results of neuron communication interference, or disruption, may include alcohol seizures. 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.

1. More than a third of people with AUD that began more than a year ago are now in full recovery.8 With treatment, people can develop new habits and stop experiencing alcohol-related seizures.
2. For people with epilepsy, alcohol may interact with epilepsy medications and worsen their side effects or make the medications less effective in preventing seizures.
3. For the patient with known epilepsy, an obvious question would be to ask if there has been any irregularity with medication use.
4. That’s why it’s important to seek professional help and undergo a medically supervised alcohol detoxification.
5. More serious symptoms include confusion, hallucinations, seizures, and delirium.

Alcohol Withdrawal Seizures

Since alcohol-induced seizures often repeat, consider this a medical emergency. Call 911 and tell the operator you think the person is experiencing an alcohol seizure. The emergency operator will often direct you on further steps to take. Before a seizure, people may experience an aura or feel a change in sensation — such as smell, taste, sound, or vision — due to abnormal activity in the brain. When people stop consuming alcohol after chronic use, they lose the inhibitory effects of the GABA receptors, resulting in the central nervous system being overstimulated. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, some studies have linked chronic alcohol misuse to the development of epilepsy.

Health Conditions

Because of the risk of seizures and other serious symptoms, detoxing from alcohol should only be attempted with medical support. The researchers also found that the risk of epilepsy increased as alcohol consumption increased. According to the researchers, these results are consistent with previous studies. Alcohol poisoning is a dangerous condition that can happen when someone drinks too much alcohol too quickly. When the body is overwhelmed by a toxic amount of alcohol, it can severely affect vital functions.

What happens when seizure medication is mixed with alcohol?

If you or someone you know has any of the above symptoms, seeking medical care urgently is essential. If you drink too much alcohol too quickly, your liver can’t remove it fast enough. This causes the amount of alcohol in the blood, also known as blood alcohol concentration (BAC), to rise. The brain functions by creating electrical impulses or messages that tell the body what to do. If you’re going to walk or talk, neurons send messages to the areas of the brain responsible for those actions. Doctors or family and friends can provide early intervention, which can help you avoid alcohol-related neurologic disease.

A heathcare provider can assess whether light or moderate alcohol drinking is safe. Alcohol withdrawal seizures (delirium tremens) occur when the body undergoes severe and unexpected nervous system changes after an alcohol-dependent person stops drinking. About half of all people with alcohol withdrawal will have two to four seizures within the six hours that follow the first.5 Without prompt treatment, these episodes can be life-threatening. A typical alcohol withdrawal seizure is a tonic-clonic seizure (also called a grand-mal seizure).4 This episode involves a loss of consciousness accompanied by violent muscle spasms. But some people can experience smaller episodes that don’t seem like full-body seizures.

What does an alcohol withdrawal seizure feel like?

It is followed by the clonic phase in which the person’s limbs jerk rhythmically and rapidly with bending of the large joints such as the elbows how to store a urine sample and knees. Every effort is made to ensure that all our information is correct and up to date. However, Epilepsy Society is unable to provide a medical opinion on specific cases. Responses to enquiries contain information relating to the general principles of investigation and management of epilepsy.

Alcohol acts by stimulating receptors in your brain that cause brain activity to be suppressed. Alcohol itself does not normally cause seizures, but during withdrawal, when the suppressive activity of alcohol is removed, your brain will be more susceptible to seizures than it normally would. There are some specific considerations that may affect your risk of seizures when using alcohol. Drinking alcohol in small amounts generally does not trigger seizures, but seizures can result from alcohol withdrawal.

Human and animal data have shown that acute alcohol intake has a biphasic effect on the central nervous system (CNS). Initially, the inhibitory gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)-ergic effect of alcohol exerts CNS depressant and anticonvulsant properties (4, 5). In the post-alcohol state, however, when alcohol blood levels decline, neuronal excitability is increased which may facilitate the occurrence of seizures in patients with epilepsy (6, 7). When this effect occurs deeply or over a long period of time, brain activity can rebound during alcohol withdrawal, exceeding normal levels and creating the risk of a seizure. Someone with an alcohol withdrawal seizure mayexperience convulsions and lose consciousness. In fact, people suffering from chronicalcohol abuseincrease their risk of developing seizures when they suddenly stop drinking.