NORSE Glossary of Terms
The following are terms that may come up in your conversations with medical staff that you should know. (The NORSE Institute is grateful to Erica Sieg, PsyD, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine for providing this content.)
Terms often used in medical conferences
Acquired brain injury vs Traumatic Brain Injury: Acquired brain injury is an umbrella term for any type of injury to a person’s brain. Traumatic brain injury is a specific type of acquired brain injury that refers to some force external to the person that causes injury such as a car accident, fall, assault, gun shot etc. that damages the brain. Some examples of acquired non-traumatic brain injury (that occur from within a person) include stroke, brain tumors, encephalitis, and NORSE and FIRES among others.
Breakthrough Seizures: Sudden unexpected seizures in someone who previously had achieved reliable seizure control with medications.
Cognition: Broad term for mental abilities (“thinking”) related to information processing such as attention, processing speed, working memory, language, visual spatial, problem solving, planning, and memory.
Comorbidities: Additional illnesses or all the illnesses present in a person, not just the primary one being discussed. For example, someone may have epilepsy and also have comorbidities of depression, anxiety, or cognitive impairment. Comorbidities can be physical, cognitive, or psychiatric.
Electroencephalography (EEG) Monitoring: the most common way to monitor brain functioning for seizure activity. It does not hurt and is not dangerous as it is only a recording device for brain waves. It does not transmit, shock, or produce any kind of electrical current. Electrodes (small metal recording devices) are placed on the surface of the scalp and secured with a safe glue or tape. Once in place, electrodes measure the electrical activity in the brain through the skull. The electrodes send the information by attached wires to a computer to be recorded and analyzed by doctors.
Epilepsy: Epilepsy is a disease characterized by an enduring predisposition to generate epileptic seizures. A seizure is one event (see below) and epilepsy is the disease involving recurrent, unprovoked seizures.
Function: What someone can do; how well they can perform or complete tasks.
Neurobehavior: Behavioral, emotional, or personality changes associated with changes in brain structure or function. Examples are aggression, irritability, apathy, crying, sadness, hallucinations, eating more/less, sleeping more/less, repeating the same activity multiple times, or not engaging in normal activities.
Neuroimaging: Any procedure that provides visual information about the structure of the brain. This includes brain scans such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET) scan or single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) among others.
Neurologic state: The state of a person’s central nervous system which includes the brain and spinal cord. When a change in this system occurs, immediate medical intervention is needed because the central nervous system regulates important aspects of the body’s internal environment like breathing and heart rate, processes all sensory information such as sight and sound, and is responsible for conscious awareness, voluntary body movement, thinking, learning, and feeling.
Seizure: Abnormal excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. In other words, an episode when the cells of the brain are too active or start acting together in ways that are atypical. This interrupts normal brain functioning and produces the associated symptoms of changes in awareness, thinking, moving, speaking, or feeling (the brain’s normal processes). Most seizures do not last longer than 2 minutes.
Status Epilepticus (“Status”): A medical emergency defined as a continuous seizure lasting more than 5 minutes, or two or more seizures without full recovery of consciousness between any of them. Essentially, this is when seizures last too long or don’t stop. This is dangerous because it can cause significant brain damage or even death.
