Dietary Approach to Seizures in Children

Category: Children's Health , Diet and Nutrition

Seizure disorders in children can affect all aspects of their well-being, not only being physically disabling and even life-threatening, children also suffer from social isolation, poor self-esteem and depression. Medications used to treat seizure disorders have serious adverse effects, cause nutritional deficiencies and are often ineffective. Now a new study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University indicates that a dietary approach can be effective in reducing the number of seizures in children who did not respond to medication.

Children between the ages of 3-18 years who were having between 4 to 470 seizures per week were enrolled in the study. The diet employed was a modified Atkins diet, lower in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein. The results (which were presented at a recent meeting of the American Epilepsy Society) showed that the children who followed the diet for 6 months, more than 80% had a 50% improvement, 44% experienced greater than 90% improvement and 25% were seizure free.

Another diet, the ketogenic diet, has been proven effective since 1921 in controlling epilepsy in children, but is quite difficult to follow and requires initial hospitalization. Both of these diets induce a state of ketosis which appears to be the key to controlling the seizures, however now an easier diet may be utilized as a treatment approach, with a low incidence of minor adverse effects. This study was small (20 subjects), so a larger trial will be required before recommendations can be made regarding this type of regimen, but the results so far look promising.

Posted by Kristopher Foster on October 17, 2013 11:00 AM