Diet May Inspire New Epilepsy Drugs

New Findings Spurred by Ketogenic Diet for Epilepsy By Miranda Hitti
WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD
on Monday, October 16, 2006

Oct. 16, 2006 -- The "ketogenic diet" might be the springboard for a
new type of epilepsy drug.

The ketogenic diet strictly limits carbohydrates and may help
control seizuresseizures in some people.

That's nothing new. The ketogenic diet has been around since the
1920s (and shouldn't be tried without medical supervision).

But the science behind the ketogenic diet and epilepsy seizures
hasn't been understood.

Now, researchers have a new clue about how the ketogenic diet works,
and they say that clue may eventually lead to new epilepsy drugs.

The finding comes from researchers including Avtar Roopra, PhD, of
the neurology department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Their study appears in Nature Neuroscience's advance online edition.

More than 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, 20 million of
whom "continue to have seizures despite treatment with current
antiepileptic drugs or surgery," Roopra's team writes.

The researchers reasoned that ketogenic diets, being low in
carbohydrates, result in very little glycolysis (carbohydrate
breakdown).

So the scientists tested a glycolysis-blocking chemical in a rat
model of epilepsy.

The chemical, called 2DG (2-deoxy-D-glucose), reduced the number and
severity of seizures in the rats.

"Our results show that 2DG has anticonvulsant and antiepileptic
properties, suggesting that antiglycolytic compounds may represent a
new class of drugs for treating epilepsy," write Roopra and
colleagues.

The scientists haven't tested 2DG on people.