Having children is a “good thing” that most couples look forward to. However, for people with epilepsy, this is a difficult choice: will epilepsy affect fertility and will children inherit the disease? This concern stops many people with epilepsy from becoming parents. Liu Xiaoying of the Department of Neurology at Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai, China, is often asked about this topic in the clinic. I think it is necessary to write some popular science articles to help patients choose. Can epilepsy be hereditary? A: Not necessarily. Epilepsy is a chronic, recurrent seizure disorder that is a manifestation of brain dysfunction caused by multiple causes. All diseases that can cause brain dysfunction can trigger seizures. Therefore, only seizures caused by a genetic disorder can be inherited. Please note that this is a “possibility” and not a certainty. In cases of symptomatic epilepsy, such as those caused by genetic disorders, we believe that the incidence of epilepsy in children is essentially the same as in the normal population. Patients should not be overly concerned. If epilepsy is hereditary, who is more likely to have a “seizure” in a boy or girl? A: There is not much difference, both boys and girls are born the same. For seizures caused by a genetic disorder, the mode of inheritance is related to the disorder itself. Unless the genetic disorder is inherited on the sex chromosome, it does not matter whether the offspring are male or female and whether they will inherit epilepsy. In contrast, for idiopathic epilepsy of unknown origin, more than 20 genes have been identified that have a significant impact on the genetic susceptibility. However, because of the complexity of epilepsy abnormalities. Each epilepsy family varies in each generation of patients, and the same disease may manifest itself differently. Some patients with epilepsy carry genetic susceptibility genes but do not necessarily develop the disease, and this has little to do with gender. Therefore, the question of epilepsy inheritance cannot be resolved by simply having a male or a female. In the next few articles, I will discuss with you one after another when epilepsy patients can have children, and discuss whether epilepsy patients can have second children in the context of the hot second-child fever right now, etc. I hope you will stay tuned.