Blog #43: Teaching Future Teachers to Recognize Non-Convulsive Seizures in Schools

(This blog was originally posted on February 19, 2014)

 

 

Yesterday I gave a PowerPoint presentation, “Recognizing Covert, Non-convulsive Epileptic Seizures in the Classroom” to California State University, Northridge students who are aspiring to become primary school teachers. This Psychological Foundations of Learning and Teaching class is in the University’s Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling. My presentation was similar to that which I gave to the California Association of School Psychologists at their November, 2013 convention in Newport Beach, CA. At that meeting the school psychologists encouraged me to present this information to teachers since they are more closely involved with school children. Teachers knowledgeable about the common, covert non-convulsive forms of epilepsy, namely Petit Mal/Absence and Complex Partial Seizure types, can help to speed up medical evaluation, diagnosis and treatment.

I was pleased to observe their interest and their surprise at my introducing them to the non-convulsive types of epilepsy. This was a new phenomenon to most of them, i.e., the ones who did not have relatives or friends with epilepsy. Some of the one percent of the American population that has epilepsy will no doubt come into these teachers’ lives at some time. The attendees have my handouts as reference for their careers.

These future teachers now are aware that children who stare off inappropriately should be challenged with commands and questions to reveal the student’s degree of contact with his environment or his loss of awareness. School children who are thought to have some sort of “learning disorder” will be assessed more closely. Included will be those suspected of daydreaming, or intermittent hearing problems, or autism or ADD, or stuttering that can occur with a brain confused amidst a non-convulsive seizure.

Recently, a neurologist colleague read a boy’s EEG. Surprising to his parents, it showed epilepsy. My colleague said, “It was just like the youngster in your epilepsy novel, DINGS. For a year he was falling behind in school. His teachers, parents and his pediatrician didn’t know what was wrong. When I told them about the EEG and I told them the epilepsy diagnosis, the parents were encouraged that DINGS could give them a better understanding of what their child and they were experiencing.”

My presentation to student teachers at the University should minimize these delays in epilepsy diagnosis.

 

 

Lance Fogan, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. DINGS is his first novel. It is a mother’s dramatic story that teaches epilepsy.