About Grand Mal Seizures

A grand mal seizure is a full-body seizure. With grand mal seizures, individuals may experience violent and severe muscle contractions, rigidity and complete loss of consciousness. Grand mal seizures usually occur because of malfunctioning of electrical discharge of the brain's nerve cells. Because of abnormal electrical activity throughout the entire brain, people experience signs of seizure throughout the entire body. Grand mal seizures are also often known as tonic-clonic seizures.

Onset Symptoms

• Symptoms that individuals experience toward the beginning of a grand mal seizure are stiff muscles, rigidity, rapid pulse, paleness of the face and body and falls. The first phase of grand mal seizures is the tonic phase, which includes loss of consciousness and muscle contraction. At this point, an individual might fall down as well. The second phase is the clonic phase, in which the muscles go into rhythmic contractions, alternately relaxing and flexing. Convulsion duration is generally less than two minutes.

Common Symptoms

• Some common symptoms that most but not all people experience with grand mal seizures include aura (warning signs) before the seizures start, loss of bladder and bowel control, unconsciousness after convulsions (lasting for a few minutes), sleepiness and fatigue, strong headaches and disorientation and confusion.

Causes

• In approximately half of grand mal seizure situations, the exact causes are unknown. However, there are many situations in which grand mal seizures are triggered by underlying health conditions and issues, such as trauma to the head, low blood levels of glucose, calcium, magnesium or sodium, drug use or withdrawal from drugs (such as alcohol), infections such as encephalitis or meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or blood vessel malformations in the brain.

Risks

• There are some other instances or situations that could put an individual at a higher risk for experiencing a grand mal seizure. Some risk factors include family history of seizures, serious medical problems that relate to electrolytes, drug use, excessive alcohol consumption and brain injury as a result of trauma, stroke, infections and various other causes.

Treatment

• The most common type of treatment for grand mal seizures is anti-seizure drugs. However, in situations in which anti-seizure medications do not provide satisfactory results, two other common treatment options are the ketogenic diet (a low-carbohydrate diet that helps to reduce seizures) and vagus nerve stimulation (nerve stimulation inserted under the collarbone that can be turned on and off).