Symptoms
Because of the effect of breathing on circulation and oxygen delivery, breathing quality is involved in all the following symptoms
- Changes in breathing pattern
- Abnormal circulatory events
- Emotional arousal
- Jerky movements or spasms
- Flashing lights in visual field
- Tingling
- Perceptual changes
- Short blank spells
- Sudden brief loss of balance
Causes
- Individuals with epilepsy have irregular breathing and difficultly adjusting their breathing in response to different levels of physical, physiological and emotional stress. This problem that can underlie an epileptic seizure.
- Anxiety can also cause fast, emotional upper chest breathing or hyperventilation that can trigger seizures.
- Seizures may occur because children with epilepsy have difficulties changing their breathing pattern to meet the different oxygen needs required at the onset of sleep, during sleep, or on waking.
This is why Breathing quality matters to children with epilepsy.
Effects
The gentle pulsing pressures of TST ‘massage’ therapy over the diaphragm are designed to strengthen the respiratory muscles and provide children with epilepsy with more mature breathing patterns which are therefore more responsive to the varied oxygen demands of daily living.
Parents report overall reductions in their children’s seizure activity and in some cases that seizure activity has stopped altogether. Please look at the epilepsy section of our Parents’ stories for more information.