Epilepsy and Learning Challenges
Most children with epilepsy have similar intellectual abilities to children without epilepsy. However, children with epilepsy have a greater chance of experiencing learning challenges than their peers.
Common Learning Challenges for Children with Epilepsy
- Paying attention and concentrating
- Understanding instructions
- Using information
- Describing things to other people
- Remembering things
- Working out how to do something new
- Organizing thoughts or tasks
- Feeling you have no energy to do things
- Feeling muddled or confused
- Feeling sad or tearful
- Feeling short tempered or grumpy
- Working out sums
- Writing or copying figures
- Developmental delays
Causes
Frequency of seizures
- A child who is experiencing frequent seizures, may not fully recover between seizures
Location of seizure activity in the brain
- When seizures are focused in a particular area of the brain, they may also affect functions controlled in that part of the brain.
Type of seizures
- When a child loses consciousness during a seizure, their mental functioning can be disrupted for up to several days.
- Absence seizures appear to disrupt short-term memory for information presented immediately before the seizure.
- Tonic-clonic seizures are followed by a period of drowsiness or inattentiveness.
- Research has shown a correlation between cognitive/behavioural difficulties and complex partial seizures.
Medication side effects
- Some anti-seizure medications may make some children tired, less alert, or hyperactive.
- Someone taking more than one anti-seizure medication is more likely to experience negative side effects than someone taking a single antiseizure medication.
- Herbal remedies can interact with prescribed medications in ways that will disrupt learning.
Age of onset
- Some anti-seizure medications may make some children tired, less alert, or hyperactive.
Type of epilepsy syndrome
- Some epilepsy syndromes (e.g. Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome) involve learning and thinking difficulties.
Epileptic (interictal) discharges
- Some children appear to be seizure-free but may be experiencing epileptic discharges in the brain, called interictal discharges or sub-clinical seizures
- Interictal discharges may produce restlessness, distractibility, inability to focus, decreased capacity for taking in new information, and behavioural disturbances.
- The underlying neurological problem causing the seizures can also impact learning and behaviour.
Other related conditions
- There are a number of other conditions that are more likely to occur in people with epilepsy than the general population, including Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Learning Disabilities, and Autism Spectrum Disorders.
* For strategies to help a child with attention deficits, please see our strategy sheets entitled: Epilepsy and ADHD and Organization and Planning.
Adapted from Children and Learning (Epilepsy Toronto) and Cognitive, Behavioural and Social Co-Morbidities in Children with Medically Refractory Epilepsy (Mary Lou Smith).
Additional Sources: Canadian Epilepsy Alliance. Learning through Storms: Epilepsy and Learning. I Elliott, L Lach, M Smith. (2004). Epilepsy Impact on the Life of a Child. Lumina, Fall, 4-5.