Treatment
Like other forms of epilepsy, noctural epilepsy can be treated with anti-convulsants. Despite the effectiveness of anti-convulsants in people who suffer from nocturnal epilepsy, anti-convulsants are shown to disrupt a persons sleeping structure. This may cause concern in people who suffer from specifically nocturnal epilepsy because undisrupted sleep is important for these people, as it lowers the likeliness of epileptic symptoms to arise. One particular study involving Bradley. V and O'Neill. D, analysed the different forms of epilepsy including nocturnal epilepsy and its relationship with sleep. They found how some patients only experienced epileptic symptoms while they were asleep (nocturnal epilepsy), and that maintaining good sleep helped in reducing epileptic symptoms. Another study determined that anti-convulsant medications can be beneficial to minimize epilepsy in people who are not just awake, but people who are asleep. However, some of these anti-convulsant medications did also have adverse effects on peoples' sleeping structure, which can exacerbate epileptic symptoms in people who suffer from nocturnal epilepsy. To minimize epileptic seizures in these people, it is important to find an anti-convulsant medication that can help alleviate epileptic symptoms, and not disrupt a persons sleeping structure. The anti-convulsant medications that were tested to meet this criteria are: Phenobarbital, Phenytoin, Carbamazepine, Valproate, Ethosuximide, Felbamate, Gabapentin, Lamotrigine, Topriamate, Vigabatrin, Tiagabine, Levitiracetam, Zonisamide, and Oxcarbazepine. Within the chart that lists these medications, Oxcarbazepine is shown to have the least amount of adverse effects on sleep, and in another study, it says that it enhances slow wave-sleep and sleep continuity in patients with epilepsy.
Read more about this topic: Nocturnal Epilepsy
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“Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, “Go to sleep by yourselves.” And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)