Febrile convulsions are, undoubtedly, one of the most frightening events you could experience with your baby.

Like the previous scary episode blog, breathe holding, febrile convulsions are:

• relatively common
• ultimately harmless
• dreadfully frightening for parents

So what is a febrile convulsion? Simply, it is a fit or convulsion while your child has a fever. The convulsion will generally involve sudden twitching of your baby’s limbs, loss of consciousness, eye rolling, unresponsiveness and cyanosis (blueness of the skin). Hence the scariness of it for anyone present! Parents who have witnessed their baby having a febrile convulsion sometimes report they felt their child was going to die. Frightening indeed.

There is extensive, credible information on Febrile Convulsions for to examine here (scroll down to “Febrile Convulsions”), Q & A factsheets and a short section in my Baby Settling and Health Guide however below are the key factors to know.

Febrile convulsions:

• are fairly common (occurring anywhere from 2 – 5% of children)
• are related to age (most fits occurring in a child aged 6 months to 5 or 6 years)
• generally only last 2-3 minutes (although your child may not wake up straight away and may be a little groggy or unbalanced afterwards)
• do NOT cause long term neurological complications (such as learning difficulties or brain damage)
• do not require you intervene other than rolling your baby onto their side afterwards (do not hold try to hold your baby still or put anything in their mouth)
• have a 30% of a reoccurrence (however this figure diminishes as your baby gets older)
• will look frightening and most likely scare you half to death! (That’s okay! Do your best to stay calm)

Even though febrile convulsions are harmless and result in an uncomplicated recovery, I do recommend a medical check afterwards. While the actual convulsion is harmless, finding the underlying cause of the fever is important – more important than both the fever and the febrile convulsion itself.

I also recommend a strong cup of coffee or chocolate injection for parents when everything has settled down. Febrile convulsions do not qualify as one of my top 3 Scary Baby Episodes for no reason!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 10th, 2010 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.