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by ycombinete 2023 days ago
This doesn’t surprise me. I’m not epileptic, but one night under strobes at a club I had a full on tonic-clonic seizure. I hadn’t been drinking, or taken any hard drugs, but I had been consuming a lot of caffeine syrups to study at university that week.

Caffeine is a hell of a drug!
1 comments
redis_mlc 2023 days ago
I haven't heard of caffeine triggering epilepsy, but yup, here's a link:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29414557/

Good to know. It wasn't reported that the Florida pilot had a seizure, but he too was too jacked up to concentrate on flying. Had it been a seizure, it would be tough get an aviation medical renewed because it can't be proved that LoC won't happen again.

Fatigue Countermeasures in Aviation (Mountain Dew Highest Caffeine Content)

https://www.asma.org/asma/media/asma/pdf-policy/2009/fatigue...

link
ycombinete 2021 days ago
So, how I understand it is that our brains have something like a seizing threshold. Which is the amount of stress they can be put under before a seizure is induced. Certain things can lower that threshold. And I think caffeine (or stimulants in general?) and lack of sleep are both things that lower it.

So it was the loud music and bright strobe light that triggered the seizure. The caffeine and the lack of sleep lowered my brains resistance to seizing.

link