Dietary therapies are established as beneficial for symptomatic generalized epilepsies such as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome; however, the outcome for idiopathic generalized epilepsy has never been specifically reported. The efficacy of the ketogenic and modified Atkins diet for childhood and juvenile absence epilepsy was evaluated from both historical literature review and patients treated at Johns ...

The ketogenic diet (KD), a high-fat, low-carbohydrate, and adequate-protein diet is an established, effective nonpharmacologic treatment option for intractable childhood epilepsy. The KD was developed in 1921 and even though it has been increasingly used worldwide in the past decade, many neurologists are not familiar with this therapeutic approach. In the past few years, alternative and more f...

Since the initial observations by Warburg in 1924, it has become clear in recent years that tumour cells require a high level of glucose to proliferate. Therefore, a ketogenic diet that provides the body with energy mainly through fat and proteins, but contains a reduced amount of carbohydrates, has become a dietary option for supporting tumour treatment and has exhibited promising results. In ...

Low-carbohydrate diets are used to manage obesity, seizure disorders, and malignancies of the central nervous system. These diets create a distinctive, but incompletely defined, cellular, molecular, and integrated metabolic state. Here, we determine the systemic and hepatic effects of long-term administration of a very low-carbohydrate, low-protein, and high-fat ketogenic diet, serially compari...

The ketogenic diet has been widely used and proved to be effective for intractable epilepsy. Although the mechanisms underlying its anti-epileptic effects remain to be proven, there are increasing experimental evidences for its neuroprotective effects along with many researches about expanding use of the diet in other neurologic disorders. The first success was reported in glucose transporter t...

A pilot prospective follow-up study of the role of the branched chain amino acids as additional therapy to the ketogenic diet was carried out in 17 children, aged between 2 and 7 years, with refractory epilepsy. All of these patients were on the ketogenic diet; none of them was seizure free, while only 13 had more or less benefited from the diet. The addition of branched chain amino acids induc...

OBJECTIVES To systematically review and synthesize the available evidence on the efficacy of the ketogenic diet in reducing seizure frequency for children with refractory epilepsy. DATA SOURCES Medline searches were performed using the keywords epilepsy/therapy, dietary therapy, and epilepsy, and the text word ketogenic diet. The Cochrane Library of clinical trials was searched using the term...

The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet long used to treat refractory epilepsy; ketogenesis (ketone body formation) is a physiological phenomenon also observed in patients following lowcarbohydrate, low-calorie diets prescribed for rapid weight loss. We report the case of a pair of twin sisters, whose high-frequency migraine improved during a ketogenic diet they followed in orde...

The ketogenic diet is a medically supervised high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that has been found useful in patients with refractory epilepsy. It has been shown to be effective in treating multiple seizure types and epilepsy syndromes. In this paper, we review the use of the ketogenic diet in epileptic encephalopathies such as Ohtahara syndrome, West syndrome, Dravet syndrome, epilepsy with myoc...