MONDAY, Feb. 24, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- A baby’s seizure in a neonatal ICU could be a red flag for future risk of epilepsy.
Newborns who suffer seizures following birth are more likely to develop epilepsy in childhood and young adulthood, a new study suggests.
More than 20% of newborns who have seizures wind up developing epilepsy by age 22, compared with a little over 1% of newborns without seizures, Danish researchers found.
“The risk of epilepsy was highest in the first year of life but remained significantly elevated throughout childhood and adolescence,” noted the research team led by Dr. Jeanette Tinggaard, a child neurologist with Copenhagen University Hospital – Risghospitalet.
In epilepsy, groups of damaged nerve cells in the brain sometimes generate abnormal and excessive electrical signals, resulting in seizures, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Seizures are one of the most frequent neurological conditions among babies placed in a NICU, researchers said in background notes. As many as 1 to 5 cases occur for every 1,000 live births.
For this study, researchers analyzed medical data for all children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018, nearly 1.3 million children total.
Of those, almost 2,000 children who grew to adulthood had suffered at least one bout of seizures as a newborn, researchers found.
About 11% of newborns that had a seizure were diagnosed with epilepsy before 1 year old, and nearly 5% between ages 1 and 5. About 3% were diagnosed with epilepsy between ages 5 and 10, and more than 1% between 10 and 22.
The risk of future epilepsy was more than doubled in newborns that had another brain condition alongside their seizures, including stroke, brain bleeding or structural brain malformations, researchers found.
Babies with seizures also were about 50% more likely to develop epilepsy if they had a low Apgar score – a quick assessment of their health immediately after birth based on appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration.
Since not all newborns who suffer seizures develop epilepsy, it’s likely that genetics or some other risk factor also is at play in these cases, Tinggaard said.
“Importantly, four out of five neonatal survivors with a history of neonatal seizures did not develop epilepsy, and we suggest future studies to explore a potential genetic predisposition,” Tinggaard concluded.
The new study appears in the journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology.
More information
The National Institutes of Health has more on epilepsy.
SOURCE: Wiley, news release, Feb. 19, 2025
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