Ketogenic diet is a nonpharmacologic treatment for childhood epilepsy not amenable to drugs. At the present time, two works based on national research, one in Germany and one in the United States provide international guidelines to ensure a correct management of the ketogenic diet. Our Italian collaborative study group was set up in order to formulate a consensus statement regarding the clinica...

OBJECTIVE Intractable epilepsy is a major difficulty in child neurology, because the numbers of drugs that are available for treatment are limited and new treatments such as diets must be tried. Now there are some diets available for treating patients with intractable epilepsy. The oldest diet is the classic ketogenic diet and one of the newest diets is the modified Atkins diet. Patients have a...

The ketogenic diet has traditionally been considered an anticonvulsant therapy of last resort, despite excellent efficacy and limited side effects. We hypothesized that the ketogenic diet would have similar results in patients with new-onset epilepsy. A retrospective study was conducted of patients started on the ketogenic diet since 1994. Thirteen of 460 (2.8%) patients were started on the ket...

The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate regimen that forces ketone-based rather than glucose-based cellular metabolism. Clinically, maintenance on a ketogenic diet has been proven effective in treating pediatric epilepsy and type II diabetes, and recent basic research provides evidence that ketogenic strategies offer promise in reducing brain injury. Cellular mechanisms hypothesized ...

PURPOSE The ketogenic diet is an alternative treatment for patients with refractory epilepsy. Most studies to date report dietary response in children. There are limited data evaluating the efficacy of the ketogenic diet in adults. This is a report of the long-term outcome in a largely adult population of patients treated with the ketogenic diet for epilepsy. METHOD Twenty-nine adult and adol...

PURPOSE The present study aimed to assess the impact of the ketogenic diet on arterial morphology and endothelial function of the big vessels of the neck and on cardiac diastolic function, in a cohort of epileptic children and young adults treated with the ketogenic diet. METHODS Patients were recruited based on the following inclusion criteria: (1) patients who were or had been on the ketoge...

To evaluate the role of diet composition on nerve agent toxicity, rats were fed four distinct diets ad libitum for 28 d prior to challenge with 110 μg/kg (1.0 LD(50), sc) soman. The four diets used were a standard rodent diet, a choline-enriched diet, a glucose-enriched diet, and a ketogenic diet. Body weight was recorded throughout the study. Toxic signs and survival were evaluated at key time...

Global metabolomic profiling offers novel opportunities for the discovery of biomarkers and for the elucidation of pathogenic mechanisms that might lead to the development of novel therapies. GLUT1 deficiency syndrome (GLUT1-DS) is an inborn error of metabolism due to reduced function of glucose transporter type 1. Clinical presentation of GLUT1-DS is heterogeneous and the disorder mirrors pati...

Ketogenic diets are low-carbohydrate, sufficient protein, high-fat diets with anticonvulsant activity used primarily as a treatment for pediatric epilepsy. The anticonvulsant mechanism is thought to involve elevating inhibition and/or otherwise limiting excitability in the brain. Such a mechanism, however, might also significantly affect normal brain activity and limit synaptic plasticity, effe...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the ketogenic diet through 3 weeks on oxidative stress and antioxidative capacity markers in Taekwondo athletes. The participants selected for this research were 18 high school taekwondo contestants aged 15-18 who had at least 5 yr of career as contestant. The subjects were randomly assigned to the ketogenic diet (KD) group and the Non...