Highlights
- •Current dietary therapies require significant medical and dietetic support.
- •Intermittent calorie restriction (CR) is a less restrictive dietary treatment.
- •CR reduces blood glucose, inflammatory markers, AMPK, and mTOR and increases autophagy.
- •These changes are expected to decrease ictogenesis and epileptogenesis.
Abstract
There has been resurgence in the use of dietary treatment, principally the classical
ketogenic diet and its variants, for people with epilepsy. These diets generally require
significant medical and dietician support. An effective but less restrictive dietary
regimen is likely to be more acceptable and more widely used. Calorie-restricted diets
appear to produce a range of biochemical and metabolic changes including reduced glucose
levels, reduced inflammatory markers, increased sirtuins, increased AMPK signaling,
inhibition of mTOR signaling, and increase in autophagy. There are studies in animal
seizure models that suggest that these biochemical and metabolic changes may decrease
ictogenesis and epileptogenesis. A calorie-restricted diet might be effective in reducing
seizures in people with epilepsy. Hence, there is a sufficient rationale to undertake
clinical trials to assess the efficacy and safety of calorie-restricted diets in people
with epilepsy.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
February 23,
2014
Received in revised form:
February 18,
2014
Received:
January 16,
2014
Identification
Copyright
© 2014 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
