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Keppra For Infant With (possibly) Epilepsy

Tue, 12/30/2014 - 13:20

When our daughter was 6 months old, she had a febrile seizure which lasted nearly 15 minutes. One side of her body shook. She was running a high fever and after a trip to the emergency room and a two day hospital stay which included a 30 minute EEG, the doctors let her go home and said it was a seizure caused by the fever since all of the tests came back negative.

Our daughter is now 14 months old and four days ago she had a tonic clonic seizure. She screamed in the middle of the night and when we rushed to her crib, her entire body was trembling. This lasted for about 25 minutes until the ambulance arrived. The shaking finally stopped and she started to cry, but she continued to stare off and on to one side for the next 30 minutes in the emergency room until the doctors gave her Ativan? to break the seizure. Blood work, lumbar puncture and 24 hour EEG tests all came back negative. Coincidentally, while she was at the hospital, she came down with a fever (101) and cough and has been sick since then.

We are scheduled for an MRI and another VIDEO EEG in three months. In the meanwhile, the pediatric neurologists have put her on Keppra until then and have even suggested she may be on it for life! Since she's been on this drug, she has seemed loopy and out of it. I don't know if this is because she is still recovering from her cold/flu or it's an effect of the drug, but my wife and I are really concerned what this drug could do to her brain during her formative years as an infant.

Once she recovers from her cold/flu, if she doesn't seem back to normal, we are seriously considering tapering off the Keppra as we're concerned about the long term impact of the drug on our infant.

Has anyone else had an infant placed on Keppra and did it have any lasting developmental effects on your child?

Could the second seizure have also been a febrile seizure? I've read online that sometimes these seizures happen right before an illness strikes in children?

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.... Thank you.

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