natural remedies for seizures

Having Seizures? What are YOU Doing to Protect Your Brain?

June 2, 2015 by James Bogash

There are natural remedies for seizures that have shown strong effectiveness in medical studies; the same types of studies that are used to document the effectiveness of the drugs that are used to treat seizures.

In other words, natural approaches to helping seizures like good sleep, omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D, the ketogenic diet and exercise have just as much support behind them as do the drugs used to treat epilepsy. But for some reason these approaches take a back seat to medications.

They are used as a last-ditch-backup-plan effort. And even then sometimes only after you ask your neurologist about them. There is this general bias that, if something is not a drug then it’s not really going to be as effective or powerful.

This bias extends throughout all specialties. How many oncologists talk to their patients about dietary changes and exercise? In my experience all too few. And this is despite many studies that find that dietary factors can double survival rate (good choices) or lower life expectancy (bad choices).

Given the many lifestyle choices that can have an active role and benefit in seizure severity, frequency and response to treatment, these are choices that every epileptic should be embracing.

Right?

I mean—it’s your BRAIN we’re talking about here. Not the pinky toe on your left foot or the nail of your index finger.

Which makes the results of this particular study a little bit more disturbing. In it, researchers looked at how many people with seizures where living a lifestyle that includes some of these simple recommendations. Here’s what they found:

About 22% of adults with active epilepsy smoked.
Only 35% of adults with active epilepsy met recommended physical activity guidelines.
Only 40% with active epilepsy reported walking for at least 10 min during the last 7 days.
Only 50% with active epilepsy reported sleeping 7 or 8 hours each day.

These are all brain-healthy behaviors that have been shown to have an impact on either the severity or frequencies of seizures or the response to anti-seizure medications. Despite this, these simple behaviors are performed at a way higher rate than they should be in people with epilepsy. And at a worse rate then the general population who do not experience seizures.

Maybe some of these percentages are due to the seizures themselves. Maybe epileptic patients are sleeping as well because of medications. Maybe they are unable to exercise because of the danger to injuring themselves or because they are too sore from the grand mal they had yesterday. And I’m sure that is the case for some of the people questioned for this study.

But smoking? There’s no excuse to make a distinct effort at quitting a behavior that is literally destroying your brain all by itself, but then is making your epilepsy worse.

There is the chance that this is due a lack of emphasis on the part of the treating physician in regards to how important these choices are for overall brain health, especially in someone who is already challenged in the brain-health department.

If you are epileptic, it is up to YOU to protect your brain in every way possible. It is up to YOU to educate yourself on ways to do so (and, if I may add, checking out my Migraines and Epilepsy book would be a good idea to start you along your way). And most importantly, it’s up to YOU to adopt these brain-healthy behaviors so that you can better control or even eliminate your seizures for a lifetime.

Natural Remedies for Seizure Control: You Haven’t Heard This

October 18, 2014 by James Bogash

I’ve been reviewing research related to seizure control and brain health for many years now through the lens of natural medicine.

I still remember being in a consult with an epileptic patient with a very well-known neurologist to discuss natural methods to help control seizures. Despite this particular neurologist’s association with one of the top healing physicians in the world, his did not feel that there was really much to be done for seizure control beyond medications.

I guess he could never really look beyond the deficiencies and brainwashing of his traditional medical, drug-oriented training to evaluate the power of natural approaches to seizures.

That was really sad for this particular patient. And every other epileptic patient saddled to a neurologist (or epileptologist, for that matter) who believe antiepileptic drugs are the only answer. They will spend their lives chasing one drug after another to find one that helps your seizures and has acceptable side effects.

But, if you’ve been lucky enough to partner up with someone who actually reads medical literature, you will find that there is a long list of approaches that have been documented in the medical literature that can help you better manage or even eliminate your seizures.

It is all about healing your brain. If you experience seizures (or migraines or both) your brain is not functioning the way it is supposed to. Messages are getting into cells that are not supposed to be. Other messages that are supposed to be delivered to the cell don’t make it. Your very brain cells are starved for energy so they can work the way it was intended.

Natural approaches to seizures take this into account. I’ve covered many of them over the years, from vitamin D to exercise to fish oils. Some are simple. Others require an upheaval of your lifestyle.

But I have never covered the approach outlined in this particular study.

I guess, had I thought about it, sleep apea would have a strong association with seizures. It’s a stress on the body and brain. It’s linked to prediabetes (prediabetes leads to sleep apnea and sleep apnea worsens prediabetes) and prediabetes is really bad for the brain. It starves brain cells of the oxygen it so desperately needs. And, it occurs at night when the seizure threshold is lower.

Researchers looked at a group of 132 adults with epilepsy to evaluate them for sleep apnea to see whether the use of a CPAP had an effect on the number of seizures over the course of a year. Here’s what they found:

Seventy-six (57.6%) of the group had obstructive sleep apnea (this is pretty darn high).
73.9% of those in the PAP-treated group had more than a 50% seizure reduction in seizures (versus only 14.3% in the untreated sleep apnea patients—HUGE difference).
Overall, the PAP-treated group experienced a 58.5% reduction in seizures (versus 17.0% in the untreated sleep apnea group—again a HUGE difference).
83.7% of those who had PAP-treated sleep apnea had a ≥ 50% seizure reduction or became seizure-free (versus 53.6% in those who did not have sleep apnea and 39.4% in those who had sleep apnea but did not use a PAP).
To put this in perspective, in those PAP-using sleep apnea adults, they were 9.9 times more likely to have a good outcome than those with untreated sleep apnea and 3.91 times those who did not have sleep apnea.
When measured in terms of seizure reduction, the group with PAP-treated sleep apnea were 32.3 times more likely to experience a ≥ 50% seizure reduction compared with the group with untreated sleep apnea and 6.13 times compared with the group with no sleep apnea.

These are some pretty serious numbers. To flip everything around, it can be said that sleep apnea is very, very bad for the brain when left untreated. If any of these fits you (whether or not you have seizures), it’s time you got checked out:

Chronic loud snoring
Witnessed apneic episodes or breathing pauses during sleep
Excessive daytime sleepiness
BMI > or equal to 28
Small jaw / small airway
Large neck size (at least 17” male, 15.5 female)
Family history of sleep apnea

In addition, your risk for sleep apnea is increased if you have high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes or untreated hypothyroidism.

If any of the above fits you AND you are epileptic, given how much of a difference it made in this study, you need to get checked out for sleep apnea and get treatment (i.e. CPAP) if you have sleep apnea.

Natural Remedies for Seizures in Women

August 6, 2014 by James Bogash

I was at a marketing event this week and ended up having a conversation about a teenage girl who had epilepsy. Natural remedies for seizures came up in conversation.

The seizures had begun about a year ago right around the time that her menstrual cycles started, and her seizures were tied to her menstrual cycles (the term for this type of seizure is “catamenial”). The answer from the “specialists” was to put her on anti-seizure meds as well as the birth control pill. Sounds great on the surface, but when you look a little deeper, you’ll see that this is not the best approach.

Progesterone is a hormone produced by both the adrenal glands and (in women), the ovum released by the ovary. While it has a long list of actions in the human body, one of the most important features of progesterone on the brain deals with allopregnanolone. Allopregnanolone is a hormone that your body produces from progesterone that has a very potent ability to calm the brain. Specifically, it works on the GABA receptors. Phenobarbital and the benzodiazepienes (like Valium, Ativan and Xanax act) on GABA receptors, so you probably have an idea of what GABA does.

Having healthy levels of progesterone is therefore important for brain health, especially where seizures are involved. Even more important is to avoid rapid changes in progesterone levels. For this reason, managing menstrual cycles of women with epilepsy is critical.

Managing menstrual cycles does NOT include using the birth control pill. The birth control pill does not fix anything. Even worse, the synthetic progesterone (called progestin) does NOT convert to allopregnanolone, so the brain loses out on the opportunity to make this protective compound. Because of this, using the birth control pill to help manage seizures in an adolescent is a bad idea and does nothing to fix the actual problem.

Menstrual irregularities in women frequently stem from imbalances between estrogen and progesterone. Prediabetes and environmental estrogen exposures (BPA, phthalates, flame retardants, etc…) are two of the biggest factors that throw off menstrual cycles and lead to a reduction in the amount of progesterone released from the ovum (inadequate luteal production of progesterone, or ILP).

Seizures that are related to the menstrual cycles (catamenial) need to be addressed from the standpoint of progesterone and menstrual irregularities. One of the tools that can be used for catamenial epilepsy is progesterone, given either orally or as a suppository.

It makes sense. It’s inexpensive, has an excellent safety profile compared to seizure drugs and it makes sense because it just supports the brain’s natural anti-seizure tools. But progesterone is a tool that is rarely used by neurologists for catamenial epilepsy.

The use of progesterone for seizures took a hit a few years back when Dr. Andrew Herzog, the most prominent researcher in the field of progesterone for seizures, had the results of a progesterone trial on temporal lobe epilepsy published. This trial did not find a benefit to the use of progesterone on temporal lobe epilepsy.

This was enough to support the neurologists’ opinions that progesterone use was worthless. But, it turns out the story wasn’t complete.

If you consider that progesterone for seizures is going to be the most effective for women who have catamenial epilepsy, the use of progesterone for all women might not make sense. Enter this particular study. In it, Dr. Herzog teased apart the data between women with catamenial epilepsy and those who did not.

Specifically, the study looked at the use of cyclic natural progesterone therapy for intractable seizures (non-responsive to medication) in 294 women. Turns out that the women who had more seizures around their menstrual cycle (3-fold or greater increase in average daily seizure frequency) had a much better response to the progesterone compared with women who had more seizures during other periods of their cycles (midfollicular and midluteal phases).

The bottom line is, used in an appropriate patient, progesterone can be a very powerful tool to help control seizures naturally. The problem is that few doctors will use even recognize the catamenial aspect of seizures (or migraines, for that matter), let alone understand that progesterone can be used in these scenarios.

Natural Remedies for Seizures: Antioxidant Protection

November 9, 2013 by James Bogash

In my book, Migraines and Epilepsy, I review the evidence that shows that oxidative stress plays a huge role in seizures. Because of this, antioxidants are a requirement in natural remedies for seizures.

This approach, however, is largely ignored by most of mainstream medicine. Even at its surface, the extremely high level of brain cell activity during a seizure is going to cause lots and lots of oxidative damage.

For those of you not familiar with the term oxidative damage, this is a process that occurs when your body’s ability to protect itself from damaging compounds is exhausted. These damaging compounds can come from outside of your body (environmental chemicals, poor quality diets, heavy metals, etc…) or can come from within your body (compounds naturally occurring when your brain cells produce needed energy).

Even before a seizure, there is a problem with the ability to produce energy in the brain. This is part of the problem setting up the situation for epilepsy in the first place. Once a seizure is triggered, there is a massive amount of activity in the brain. All of this requires even more energy on top of a brain that is already WAY overtaxed.

The result is brain damage at the cellular level called oxidative stress. Even after the seizure, the oxidative stress remains and can only be combated by targeted lifestyle changes and supplementation (which are outlined in my Migraines and Epilepsy book).

Just in case you have never heard this information from your neurologist or epileptologist and so I must be misinformed, I present this particular study.

In this study, researchers looked at the potential to use a simple saliva test in children with epilepsy. Specifically, they compared the oxidative stress markers lactate dehydrogenase (LDH-an enzyme that converts lactate to pyruvate to make energy for our cells), MMP-9 (an enzyme that is believed to help protect the brain in times of stress) as well as 3 other markers of oxidative stress (peroxidase activity, superoxide dismutase activity and carbonyls) in normal children, children with controlled epilepsy and children with intractable epilepsy. Here’s what they found:

LDH concentrations were 38% lower in epileptic children and a whopping 76% lower in those with intractable epilepsy.
Peroxidase activity was 6% higher in epileptic children and 10% higher in intractable seizures.
SOD activity was 37% higher in children with seizures and 29% higher in the uncontrollable seizures.
Carbonyls level were 59% higher in the epileptic group and 56% higher in intractable seizures.
MMP 9 concentrations dropped by 12% in epileptic kids and 23% in intractable epilepsy.

So what does this technical jargon mean?

It means that, in epilepsy in general, and even more so as the seizures become harder and harder to control, these children are being bombarded at the cellular levels by damaging compounds. The long-term risk of damage to their sensitive brains is great.

With more and more studies like these, it is becoming increasingly difficult for seizure specialists to ignore the background damage that is occurring in the brains of epilepsy patients. With what we know, it is a requirement to have a discussion about reducing oxidative stress through eliminating toxic lifestyle habits as well as increasing the brain’s ability to protect itself through positive dietary choices and targeted supplementation.

Just merely attempting to control the seizures with medication is not enough. Period.

Natural Remedies for Seizures: Stress Issues

November 3, 2013 by James Bogash

Stress kills us. Luckily, it’s not a quick death, but rather a slow, agonizing death over the course of years. But what does it do to your brain in the meantime?

It is clear that stress will fire off an epileptic seizure faster than just about anything else. But is stress so damaging to the brain that it could actually cause epilepsy? I’ve written in a previous blog post that those who were more physically active were less likely to develop epilepsy, so the idea that we can control our risk of developing epilepsy with the lifestyle choice we make is not unheard of.

Early life stress exposures to stress contributing to epilepsy is exactly the question that researchers asked in this particular study. If we can protect our brain on the front end, the likelihood of even haven’t that first seizure if much reduced. Once a first seizure is experienced, there is a possibility that a pathway through the brain cells gets created, making future seizures more likely. This process is called epileptogenesis.

Back to the article. In it, the author reviews the research that suggests that stress, when prolonged and severe, can cause epilepsy. In addition, there are suggestions that early life stress can have the same effect on the development of epilepsy.

While this isn’t a clinical study with data to share, it should open up your mind to just how damaging stress is to your brain. It destroys it. Enough so that serious neurological disorders like chronic migraine headaches, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s dementia and Parkinson’s disease have stress as a major contributor.

This means that if you have one of these conditions or have a parent with one of these conditions stress avoidance or at least management is even more important. If your are a parent of a young child, this message is absolutely critical. You MUST manage stress in your life and teach your child the joys of life and shelter them from a stressful household.

Exercise, meditation, biofeedback, yoga, deep prayer, hypnosis or any other tool that feels right to you. Today.

Natural Remedies for Seizures: Is Epilepsy an Inflammatory Condition?

October 18, 2013 by James Bogash

The superficial understanding of epilepsy is that you have a region of brain cells that fire excessively, causing problems. If we can lock down the action of these cells, everything’s all good.

This is an incredibly simplistic view of seizures, but this is usually as far as most neurologists will get. The entire effort of an epileptic patient is focused on controlling the seizures. If this is successful (and, on the first shot, this happens only about 30% of the time) then everyone high-fives each other and pats each other on the back.

All of the anti-epileptic medications attempt to prevent a cell from firing in one way or another. But, as I’ve certainly mentioned before, this does nothing to address what created the problem in the first place. Why was this brain cell or region of brain cells “sick” to begin with? To me, this should be the most critical question asked, yet rarely is.

My book, Migraines and Epilepsy, delves into the “why” question quite heavily. Of critical importance is how effectively our brain cells can generate energy in the form of ATP (a process that occurs in the mitochondria—the powerhouse of the cell). Anything that begins to disrupt the ability of the brain cell to generate the massive amount of energy that it requires to function normally is going to create a problem.

Inflammation can do just that. It is a drag on the system, shifting needed resources to prepare to fight off some invader or other stressor. In this particular study, the researchers looked for links between epilepsy and inflammation.

Specifically, they looked at several compounds produced by the body that are associated with inflammation, including:

Several interleukins (IL-6, IL6-sR, IL-1, IL-1RA and TNF-α,

In addition, since iron plays such a large role in inflammation (iron, when not attached to a hemoglobin molecule and carrying oxygen around, is a strong oxidizing agent—think rust), they looked as several markers of iron status and metabolism:

Hemoglobin concentration (Hgb), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), hematocrit (Hct) red blood cell (RBC) count, serum iron and copper concentrations as well as several other markers looking at iron metabolism,

While all this sounds a little technical, the bottom line is that they were looking for whether or not inflammation was related to seizure severity and whether or not iron status was also related to seizure activity.

They looked at the interictal period (ictal = the time during a seizure, so “inter” ictal would be the period of time when a seizure was not occurring). Seizures themselves create a great deal of inflammation to the brain during the ictal period, but by checking the interictal period, it is a much better reflection on what is going on in the epileptic’s physiology.

Overall, here’s what they found:

There was an increase of IL-6 and a decrease of TNF-α in the epileptic patients.
There were also changes in iron metabolism consistent with acute inflammation.
Higher seizure frequencies were seen with higher eCp (a sign that inflammation levels were higher)
Seizure frequency was also higher with lower Hgb and Hct (since these two compounds help deliver oxygen to the brain, lower levels would essentially starve the brain of oxygen and reduce the amount of energy brain cells could make),
Those patients who had longer durations of epilepsy had lower levels of TNF-α.

Overall, while the results of this study are pretty detailed, the bottom line is that inflammation has a clear role to play in epilepsy. Whether it is directly related or whether it is indirectly related by lowering the ability of red blood cells to deliver enough oxygen to the brain has yet to be seen.

What we can determine, however, is that anti-inflammatory lifestyles high in omega-3 and lower in omega-6, lower stress, unprocessed foods and contains exercise is going to have a strong benefit. There have been studies on all these aspects, demonstrating that the better you take care of yourself, the less likely you are to have seizures.

Can Epilepsy be Prevented?

October 12, 2013 by James Bogash

Regardless of the condition, prevention is a world easier than a cure, although incredibly less dramatic. But can seizures be prevented?

Many would think this is a pointless question. The general consensus is that we know so little about what causes a seizure that we couldn’t possibly know enough to prevent to onset of epilepsy. It is well established that things like a family history of seizures or prior head trauma can contribute to the onset of epilepsy, but these hardly fall under the category of deliberately preventable.

For myself, however, I firmly believe that we have a good grasp on what happens to the brain cells to produce seizures, enough so that I’ve written a book on the topic that focuses heavily on things that you can do to protect and heal your brain (which you can take a look at by clicking here).

Since exercise is so strongly protective to the brain, it would seem a good question to ask if exercise and cardiovascular fitness could play a role in preventing the development of epilepsy. Which, ironically, is the topic of this particular article. In it, researchers looked at over 1 million Swedish conscripts and followed them over the course of 40 years to look at this relationship. Here’s what they found:

Compared to those with the best cardiovascular fitness levels, those who had low cardiovascular fitness had a 79% higher risk of developing epilepsy.
By the same comparison, medium cardiovascular fitness led to a 36% higher risk.

To put this in reverse terms, having a high level of cardiovascular fitness was strongly protective against the development of epilepsy. This may seem like a stretch based on the average understanding of seizures, but when you look at how much good cardiovascular health plays a role in the optimal function of the brain, it doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

Either way, there was a clear association, which adds further weight to the concept that we are strongly in control of what happens to our brains, from dementia to Alzheimer’s to migraines and seizures. For the migraineur or epileptic who has already crossed that line, the addition of exercise to your treatment regimen is not optional—it is an absolute requirement.

Stress and Seizures. Good or Bad?

October 2, 2013 by James Bogash

Before we answer that question, we need to understand that stress is supposed to be good for us.

While many may find that hard to believe, the stress response is an adaptive response designed to protect us in times of hardship. This may be an increased storage of calories for a famine or a heightened immune response to fend off an infection. In addition, the acute stress response produces a sharpening of the neurological system. Makes sense—you really wouldn’t want to lose focus when chased by a saber-toothed tiger.

Either way, that was then. This is now.

Acute stress no longer has a place in the world we live in. Sure, we get cut off in traffic or pissed off on the phone with the cellular phone company, but rarely do the majority of us have to deal with life-threatening situations that require a true acute stress adrenaline surge.

Rather, our lives seem dominated by chronic stress that never seems to have an end. But what does this do to our brains and does this have an impact on the development and further risk of seizures?

In my book, Migraines and Epilepsy, I point out that acute stress is protective for our brains and against seizures, while chronic stress destroys our brains and promotes seizures.

This particular article goes a long way towards explaining how this may happen. But first, a primer on adrenal hormones and stress.

The outside part of the adrenals, called the cortex, produces 3 hormones: cortisol, aldosterone and DHEA. Aldosterone helps to conserve sodium to keep our blood pressure elevated. Cortisol is the body’s stress hormone. DHEA, dehyrdoepiandrosterone, is used by our bodies to make other steroid hormones like testosterone, estrogen and progesterone. When we experience chronic stress, the cortex of the adrenal glands can only make so much end-product and the default choice is cortisol, leading to lower levels of aldosterone and DHEA. So what happens now?

Researchers looked at what role DHEA played at the synapses of brain cells (the gap between two neurons where messages get passed along). Specifically, the transfer of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate in seizures. In general, the more glutamate that is present in the synaptic cleft between the brain cells, the more the brain cells fire, potentially perpetuating a seizure and creating a massive amount of damage to the cells.

Giving DHEA to rats who had seizures induced by iron led to an increase in the transporters responsible for getting the glutamate out of the synaptic cleft. Less glutamate means that those brain cells are going to fire less. This is a very good thing and goes a long way towards understanding how adrenal health and stress contribute so massively to seizures.

For this reason, stress management HAS to be a major tool for anyone dealing with epilepsy and seizures.