For some individuals, sleep is disturbed not by things but by seizures. You can have seizures while you sleep, whatever type of epilepsy you may have. However, with some unique forms of epilepsy, seizures can occur during sleep.
The cells in your brain communicate with your nerves, muscles and other areas of your brain with the use of electrical signals. Sometimes, these signals are disrupted. When that happens, a seizure occurs. If in case you have two or more seizures at 24 hours apart, and they weren’t brought about by medicine, you may have epilepsy.
There are many distinctive forms of epilepsy. If more than 90% of your seizures occur as you sleep, you may have nocturnal seizures or sleep epilepsy.
It’s believed that sleep epilepsy is caused by changes in the brain’s electrical signals while you sleep. Most sleep seizures arise in stage 1 and stage 2 sleep, which are also the stages known for lighter sleep. Sleep seizures may also occur upon waking up from sleeping. Most of the time, sleep seizures occur as partial seizures.
Sleep seizures are associated with various types of epilepsy, such as the following:
- Juvenile myoclonic
- Grand mal
- Benign focal epilepsy
- Landau-Kleffner syndrome (LKS)
- Frontal onset seizures
Sleep epilepsy disrupts sleep. They also have effects on attention and performance at work or school. Lack of sleep can be some of the triggers for seizures. Other triggers are stress and fever.