Epilepsy is a medical condition that produces seizures. When a person has two or more seizures, he or she is considered to have epilepsy.
A seizure happens when a brief, strong surge of electrical activity affects part or all of the brain.
One in 10 adults will have a seizure sometime during their life.
Seizures can last from a few seconds to a few hours. They include convulsions, loss of consciousness, blank staring, lip smacking or jerking movements of arms and legs.
More than three million people in the United States have some form of epilepsy.
About 200,000 new cases of epilepsy and seizure disorders are diagnosed every year.
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Dealing With Seizures
For some children, seizures begin at a very young age. There are different ways to deal with them, and for some the answer is diet.
 
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Childhood epilepsy is usually treated with seizure-preventing medicines called antiepileptic or anticonvulsant drugs. If the drugs don't work or the child has a lot of side effects, surgery or the ketogenic diet may be tried.
If surgery is not an option, or the diet doesn't work, a new form of therapy called vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) may be tried.
The ketogenic diet forces a child's body to burn fat round the clock by keeping calories low and making fat products the primary food for the child.
Kids eat larger amounts of butter, oil and cream. The diet gets about 80 percent of its calories from fat. The rest comes from carbohydrates and protein. Each meal has about four-times as much fat as protein or carbohydrate.
The amounts of food and liquid at each meal have to be carefully measured for each person. The diet actually mimics starvation in a child's body.
Doctors are now studying why burning fat for energy prevents seizures, but they're not really sure why the diet works. They also don't know why it works for some children and not for others.
Many families need a period of trial and error before it's clear whether a child is going to respond to the diet. Doctors often ask parents to try it for at least a month. A child usually continues taking anti-seizure medication with the goal of discontinuing it altogether.
About one-third of children who try the ketogenic diet become seizure-free, another third improve but still have some seizures and the rest do not respond or find it too hard to follow the diet.
Some parents say their children are more alert and make more progress when on the diet, even if seizures continue. If it seems to be helping, doctors usually prescribe it for about two years. Then, they suggest parents slowly begin including regular food into the child's diet.
Reported side effects of the diet include dehydration, constipation and sometimes complications from kidney stones or gall stones.
Children are carefully monitored by a dietitian and a physician to make sure their blood work and cholesterol levels remain normal.
