Giving children with epilepsy a special low-carb diet reduces the number of seizures they experience by 75% compared with children on a normal diet, according to a study carried out at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London.
Previous studies have suggested that the food regime, which is similar to the Atkins diet, is effective at curbing epilepsy but this is the first gold standard clinical trial to prove that it works.
“When she went on the diet within days she was just so much calmer,” said Rachel Farrand, whose six-year-old daughter, Ella Strutton, was part of the trial.
Ella developed epilepsy after contracting meningitis when she was one. She is now profoundly deaf, has severe learning difficulties and before taking part in the trial she was suffering up to 12 seizures a day. “It made it very hard for her to learn because she couldn’t concentrate at all,” said Farrand. After starting the diet she was seizure-free for six months and now no longer needs to take anti-epilepsy medication.
About one in 200 children are affected by epilepsy, which can often be controlled with regular drugs.
Professor Helen Cross at the Institute of Child Health at University College London and her colleagues recruited 145 children aged between two and 16 who had severe epilepsy. Half were randomly assigned to a ketogenic diet, which involves eating no carbohydrate and no more than the minimum dietary requirement of protein. Fat is permitted. The other half ate a normal diet. Forty-two children were not included in the final analysis.
The team found that the number of seizures a day in the ketogenic diet group dropped to 62% of the level before the change, while the control group’s seizures increased by 37%. Twenty-eight children in the diet group had a more than 50% reduction in their seizures compared with four in the control group. The results are reported in the journal Lancet Neurology.
Cross said it was important to have used the gold standard scientific method to confirm that the ketogenic diet is effective. “At present it is a treatment that is reserved for the really intractable,” she said. –