Host: The Japanese Society of Toxicology
Name : The 51st Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicology
Date : July 03, 2024 - July 05, 2024
Convulsion is a series of paroxysmal motor symptoms that starts with sustained muscle contractions (tonic phase) and evolves into clonic muscle contractions (clonic phase). Convulsions (tonic-clonic seizures) appear when neurons in the cerebral cortex gets hyperexcited due to some reasons. If hyper-excitation occurs all at once in the cerebrum, then generalized convulsions will appear. On the other hand, if it begins with local neuronal hyper-excitation, a motor seizure (e.g. clonic seizure) appears in one part of the body and then spreads to the entire body (focal to bilateral tonic-clonic seizure). The causes include acute brain damage (acute symptomatic seizures) and epilepsy. Acute symptomatic seizures occur due to acute brain damage, for example, encephalitis, head trauma, new stroke or electrolyte abnormalities such as hypoglycemia. In epilepsy, cortical neurons acquire hyper-excitable predisposition, resulting in the recurrent (more than single) epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures are not always “convulsions”. Some seizures only manifest impaired awareness with movement arrest, unresponsiveness and some mild oral or hand automatisms. Drug-induced convulsions occurs by altering the excitatory/inhibitory balance of the cerebral cortex and thus resulting in hyperexcitability. It would be a “single” acute symptomatic seizure or be a first seizure of chronic epilepsy. I will introduce actual convulsions and epileptic seizures from a neurological practice and outline the risks of drug-induced convulsions.
