Association of Maternal and Fetal Factors With the Development of Epilepsy

There exist two schools of thought concerning the relative importance of heredity and brain damage as causal factors in the development of epileptic seizures. The proponents of a genetic hypothesis maintain that in a majority of cases epilepsy or the tendency to have epilepsy is inherited as a recessive trait. On the other hand, proponents of the brain injury hypothesis state that in most cases anoxia during the prenatal and paranatal periods has resulted in brain damage, which in turn is the basic cause of the convulsive seizures. The evidence on which these differing hypotheses are based might be divided into three types: clinical, experimental, and pathological. The clinical evidence consists of the determination of frequency of a family history of epilepsy and frequency of brain injury among a group of epileptic patients. For example, Lennox found that, in a group of 2,053 patients, 37% had a family history of