SHAKE THAT SEIZURE: HOME > THE PROJECT

Barometric pressure is the pressure of the air that's pressing in all directions. In regular weather forecasts, the meteorologists are almost always talking about the air's pressure at the ground. The air's pressure is caused by the weight of all the air above the ground pressing down - gravity pulls air toward the earth just as it pulls everything else. It's called "barometric" pressure because an instrument called a barometer is used to measure air pressure. If you want to know more about what exactly barometers measure and which ones will be used for this study, please see the 'Questions' pages. With regards to weather and BP, falling pressure means that clouds and precipitation are likely. Rising air pressure signals that clear weather is likely.

According to Merriam-Webster, epilepsy is "any various disorders marked by disturbed electrical rhythms of the central nervous system and typically manifested by convulsive attacks usually with clouding of consciousness." These "disturbed electrical rhythms" are seizures. That is quite the textbook definition, and since epilepsy and various seizures are so extremely complex, we'll break it down further later.

So there you have the simple version: Barometric Pressure (BP) and Seizures (SZ). As we have electrical storms outside our windows, and those of us who are epileptics have them in our heads, could it be possible that some of the initital conditions that cause those storms might be the same? Answering that question successfully with either a yes or a no is the very essence of this project. It is going to take a long time and an extreme amount of data for a potential relationship to either be found or discarded. In the end I hope that we'll find out that the weather outside has no effect at all on epileptics, for that would rule out a seizure trigger! However, should there be a relationship, this site and many others will hopefully benefit those who can use the technology of today and the archived data regarding epilepsy's past, to do something positive.

For now, this site is very simple. The project will only cover the continental United States with maybe a few observations on other parts of North America. The geographic region is limited to what I can access via zipcodes. I am using the zipcodes to get a general area of where seizures are occuring. With the zips, I can pull necessary data regarding the weather (past & present) and study the BP of those locations when seizures happened. I will need all your seizure dates and the zipcodes for where they happened. It is going to be a long process, but let's make something of it.