Responding to Seizures

 From CNF

Seizures can be life-threatening, but knowing what to do and acting quickly can help prevent a seizure emergency. In the second part of our new Healthy Epilepsy Management Series, we dive into two things you need to know about before a seizure occurs: Seizure Action Plans and seizure rescue medications. A Seizure Action Plan contains tailored guidelines on how to respond during a seizure, based on your child’s medical history. It's important because it can reduce the time to action during a seizure which, in turn, reduce risks associated with seizures. Seizure rescue medications or treatments are meant to be used in specific situations. If used properly, they may stop seizures quickly and effectively, although they should never take the place of daily seizure medications. Pediatric epileptologist Dr. Jeffrey Buchhalter discusses what a seizure plan should include, when and how to administer seizure rescue medication, and what to do afterwards. Watch that video below or catch it on YouTube here.

Thank you to our 2021 Education Partners: bluebird bio, Greenwich Biosciences, Origin and UCB.

More Tools & Information

If you would like to learn more about the topics Dr. Jeffrey Buchhalter discusses in this week's video, we recommend checking out the following tools and resources.  For Seizure Action Plans The Child Neurology Foundation has two templates available to download and use  - one for Seizure Action Plans (available here in English or here in Spanish) and one specific for School Seizure Action Plan (in English here or in Spanish here).  The Seizure Action Plan Coalition is also a great place to learn more about seizure action plans and find additional templates to download.   For Seizure Rescue Medications  The Epilepsy Foundation's seizure rescue therapies webpage has lots of information about the different kinds of rescue medicines that are available, how to use them, common side effects and much more. If you haven't checked it out yet, you can also find more topics about Health Epilepsy Management on our new Epilepsy Education Hub, including last week's video about diet considerations as one way to control seizures.