What causes long-term sleep muscle spasms in children?

Children are very prone to convulsions, especially younger babies. Their fingers or toes often shake involuntarily while they sleep. This is actually a convulsion. Many people think that this is epilepsy in the baby, but this is a symptom caused by the baby's incomplete development of the nervous system. In most cases, this is a normal phenomenon, but if a child has sleep muscle spasms for a long time, parents should pay attention to it and it is best to go to the hospital for a check-up. The common causes are as follows.

What causes long-term sleep muscle spasms in children?

We have seen many children who easily have convulsions while sleeping, just like sometimes dreaming of stepping on air while sleeping. In fact, this is sleep muscle spasm in children. This disease has no fixed pattern and no fixed twitching site. Some people have fingers, some have feet or toes, some have more, some have less, but most of them will not affect sleep.

There are many causes of myoclonus, including epilepsy (including infantile spasms), cerebellar ataxia, hypocalcemia and some metabolic diseases. In infancy, myoclonus may occur because the nervous system is not fully developed. This is not pathological and will disappear as the infant grows up (usually after 2-7 months).

However, myoclonus caused by diseases such as epilepsy and infantile spasms usually shows epileptic discharges during EEG examination. If parents are not sure whether their child's sleep muscle spasms are caused by epilepsy, it is best to go to the hospital for an EEG test. If myoclonus occurs frequently and the conventional EEG examination is normal, 24-hour myoclonic dynamic EEG monitoring can be performed to improve the detection rate of epileptic discharges.

However, benign neonatal sleep myoclonus is relatively common in newborns, and many people do not know what this disease is, so they feel mysterious and fearful about it. Many parents, due to lack of understanding and yet their love for their children, often associate children's sleep myoclonus with epilepsy and scare themselves. This is completely unnecessary. In fact, as long as there is a certain understanding and knowledge of the pathogenesis and causes of benign neonatal sleep myoclonus, the symptoms can be identified in the shortest time and the right medicine can be prescribed. In this way, it can be easily cured.

From the above description, we can know that many babies are prone to sleep muscle spasms when they are just born. This is caused by incomplete development of the nervous system. It usually disappears after 2-7 months. It is not an epilepsy disease. Therefore, parents should relax, learn more about this aspect, and pay more attention to observing the baby's condition.