A Multicenter Study of the Efficacy of the Ketogenic Diet

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Abstract
THE KETOGENIC diet is an individually calculated and rigidly controlled, high-fat, low-protein, low-carbohydrate diet used for the treatment of difficult-to-control seizures. Originally developed in the 1920s, this diet was designed to mimic the biochemical changes associated with starvation.1 In that era, when few anticonvulsants were available, 60% to 75% of children placed on the diet had a more than 50% decrease in their seizures and 30% to 40% of those had a greater than 90% decrease in the frequency of seizures.2 When the clinical efficacy of diphenylhydantoin was reported in 1938, attention turned to new anticonvulsant development and therapy.