Hacker News Reader

Comment by vegardx | Hacker News Reader

Seizures during a manic or hypomanic episode is very common, it's often what lands undiagnosed people in hospital to begin with. Lamotrigine and Lithium was primarily used to treat epilepsy, now they're also used to treat mood disorders like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as well.

The problem is often that there are compounding issues. There's nothing that stops you from having TIA at the same time. People often describe being overworked and stressed as burning the candle from both ends. Hypomania can more aptly be described as setting the entire thing on fire.

My post wasn't meant as some form of medical diagnosis, more of an observation from someone that lives with this. The feeling of numbness and having some sort of brain fog is how a lot of people with mood disorders like ADHD and bipolar disorder would describe things.

View on HN

Do you have any sort of citation for this? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’d really like to read more.

My understanding of the med lit is that bipolar and epilepsy aren’t particularly associated, and pure BD in particular is a rarity - when epileptic patients were assessed for BD symptoms, they were mostly only found in the confusional states pre- and post-seizure, which isn’t BD at all.

At least in my hospital, the most common way we get BD patients hospitalized is either during a severe depressive episode, or when their mania results in violence or law-breaking. We do sometimes have patients land on our floor whose first presentation was seizure, but that’s after they’re assessed by neuro and found that it was pseudoseizure (factitious seizure).

I don't really have anything like that. People diagnosed with bipolar disorder in Norway are given the opportunity to attend a six months intensive and in-depth group therapy where the primary focus is to learn about the disorder by psychiatrists that specialize in bipolar disorder. I've always taken what they said at face value. At least a couple in the group was first admitted after having had a seizure during a manic episode.

I think you're right in that we don't think they are directly associated. I was more trying to explain that people might experience something that looks like a seizure without having epilepsy. And that medication (previously, mostly) used to treat epilepsy seemingly have great effect on people that suffer from bipolar disorder, which would lead us to believe that there are some neurological similarities.

And you're right, the most common way to end up in the hospital is from having a manic episode with all that it usually entails. I shouldn't have written it was often the reason, just one of many reasons people might end up in the hospital from mood disorders.

Maybe serotonin syndrome? That causes seizure like stuff and mania.

Serotonin syndrome is due to an excess of serotonin almost exclusively due to serotonin agonists. Seizure is pretty rare - it produces stuff that looks like seizure (myoclonus, tremor, delirium), but actual seizure is only seen in SS so severe that it’s usually fatal.

Unrelated but have you seen our friend TedPetrou recently? He seems to have gone quiet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com