Eating Away At Illness

free fatty acid Lydia Becket was only a year old when the seizures started — racking convulsions that came in waves, often several a day. For two years, her parents tried one medication after another: Tegretol, phenobarbital and Topamax. The same drugs that bring relief to many children with epilepsy just made her sicker. Then Lydia's medical team put her on a ketogenic — or high-fat, low-carbohydrate — diet. Within a week, she was seizure-free. "I don't know where we would be if it wasn't for that diet," says her mother, Camilla Becket, who has chronicled the stories of several families coping with epilepsy in the film "Childhood Epilepsy: What You Need to Know." The diet, which is more than 85 years old and has been extensively studied, made headlines earlier this month when British researchers presented the strongest evidence to date of its efficacy. In a randomized, controlled study of 145 children ages 2 to 16 who had more than seven seizures a week and were unresponsive to medication, senior author Dr. J. Helen Cross of the Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London reported a 38 percent reduction in mean seizure frequency among the 54 children assigned to receive the ketogenic diet. The control group experienced an increase in seizures, according to the report, which appeared in the online edition of Lancet Neurology. The results come as researchers and physicians are seeking ways to leverage the ketogenic diet to treat various other neurological disorders, including ALS, brain tumors, autism, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, narcolepsy and migraines. Many of these conditions respond to anticonvulsant medications, says Dr. Eric Kossoff, medical director of the Ketogenic Diet Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the ketogenic diet seems to act as an anticonvulsant.