It usually lasts between 5 and 30 minutes, but sometimes longer in the case of larger or more severe seizures, and is characterized by drowsiness, confusion, nausea, hypertension, headache or migraine, and other disorienting symptoms.
About 6% of patients who had tonic–clonic seizures experienced Todd's paresis afterward, with loss of motor function sometimes accompanied with temporary numbness, blindness, or deafness.
Tending to occur with bilateral seizure types, it is characterized by auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, affective change, and aggression.
Following the typical postictal confusion and lethargy, the person gradually recovers to a normal lucid state.
The psychosis is typically treated medically using atypical antipsychotics and benzodiazepines, and successful epilepsy surgery can resolve the psychotic episodes.
[3] Neurotransmitters must be present in the axon terminal and then exocytosed into the synaptic cleft in order to propagate the signal to the next neuron.
[3] To provide direct evidence for this, Hammers et al. did positron emission tomography (PET) scanning of radiolabelled ligands before, during, and after spontaneous seizures in humans.
[7] Hammers notes that cerebral bloodflow after a seizure cannot account for the increase in PET activity observed.
[2] Leftover inhibitory signals are the most likely explanation for why there would be a period in which the threshold for provoking a second seizure is high, and lowered excitability may also explain some of the postictal symptoms.
[3] While not an example of active inhibition, acidosis of the blood could aid in ending the seizure and also depress neuron firing following its conclusion.
Hosokawa's model used EL mice, in which seizures begin in the hippocampus and present similarly to the behaviors observed in human epileptic patients.
If humans show similar uncoupling of perfusion and metabolism, this would result in hypoperfusion in the affected area, a possible explanation for the confusion and 'fog' patients experience following a seizure.