With the introduction of Internet communications, parental interest has increased in the use of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy. It was decided to audit current practice in the use of the ketogenic diet in the UK. All paediatric dietitians who were members of the Paediatric Group of the British Dietetic Association were surveyed by a postal questionnaire. There was a 51% response rate. Twenty-t...

Intensive insulin therapy and protein restriction delay the development of nephropathy in a variety of conditions, but few interventions are known to reverse nephropathy. Having recently observed that the ketone 3-beta-hydroxybutyric acid (3-OHB) reduces molecular responses to glucose, we hypothesized that a ketogenic diet, which produces prolonged elevation of 3-OHB, may reverse pathological p...

The prevalence of epilepsy in sub-Saharan Africa is higher than in other parts of the world, but it is short of the effective measure on treating intractable epilepsy. Epilepsy surgery is not easy to be performed due to the high cost and demand of operational skills. The authors planned to perform ketogenic diet therapy for the children with intractable epilepsy in Ghana with regard to its low ...

The hippocampus is prone to epileptic seizures and is a key brain region and experimental platform for investigating mechanisms associated with the abnormal neuronal excitability that characterizes a seizure. Accordingly, the hippocampal slice is a common in vitro model to study treatments that may prevent or reduce seizure activity. The ketogenic diet is a metabolic therapy used to treat epile...

objective the aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the ketogenic diet on the growth parameters of the children with resistant epilepsy. materials & methods a total of 36 children with resistant epilepsy who were 2 to 7 year old were put on the ketogenic diet. their growth and biochemical parameters were studied at the beginning of the study and after 3 months. results weight decrease...

A ketogenic diet suppresses seizure activity in children and in juvenile rats. To investigate whether alteration in brain IGF activity could be involved in the beneficial effects of the ketogenic diet, we examined the effects of this diet on IGF system gene expression in the rat brain. Juvenile rats were fed one of three different diets for 7 d: ad libitum standard rat chow (AL-Std), calorie-re...

BACKGROUND The ketogenic diet has been widely and successfully used to treat children with drug-resistant epilepsy since the 1920s. The aim of this study was to test the efficacy of the ketogenic diet in a randomised controlled trial. METHODS 145 children aged between 2 and 16 years who had at least daily seizures (or more than seven seizures per week), had failed to respond to at least two a...

BACKGROUND Management of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) has been difficult using standard therapy (radiation with temozolomide chemotherapy). The ketogenic diet is used commonly to treat refractory epilepsy in children and, when administered in restricted amounts, can also target energy metabolism in brain tumors. We report the case of a 65-year-old woman who presented with progressive memory lo...

This review reports on the past, current and potential future developments in aspects of the ketogenic diet in epilepsy treatment for children who have refractory epilepsy (uncontrolled seizures after having tried at least two anti-epileptic drugs). The ketogenic diet is based on putting the body into ketosis, so that is uses ketones rather than glucose for the energy in the brain. The diet com...

The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate protein, low carbohydrate diet that has been used for the treatment of intractable childhood epilepsy since the 1920s. The diet mimics the biochemical changes associated with starvation, which create ketosis. Although less commonly used in later decades because of the increased availability of anticonvulsants, the ketogenic diet has re-emerged as a the...