Although it has long been known that alcohol withdrawal can lead to seizures [89], these provoked seizures have been excluded in the GBD 2005 definition of epilepsy. Consistent with the GBD 2005 definition, we used the definitions of epilepsy from the International League against Epilepsy and the International Bureau for Epilepsy, which describe epilepsy as a disorder of the brain characterized by an enduring predisposition to generate epileptic seizures. The cited definition of epilepsy requires the occurrence of at least one epileptic seizure [90]. In line with this definition we used the studies which had unprovoked or other grand mal seizures as an outcome, in addition to those that used physician-diagnosed epilepsy as their outcome. We found a consistent relationship between alcohol consumption and increased risk of thus-defined epilepsy, especially for higher doses of alcohol [91-97].
