Mogens Andreasen from Aarhus University has just received DKK 62,543 from the Riisfort Foundation. The goes towards a project to investigate why a high fat diet helps epileptics to have fewer seizures.

2014.11.06 | Helle Horskjær Hansen

Mogens Andreasen from Aarhus University has received DKK 62,543 from the Riisfort Foundation.

About 50,000 Danes suffer from epilepsy and thirty per cent of them hardly benefit from the medical treatment. Since the 1990s increasing efforts have been made to use dietary treatment of the patients in question, especially in the case of children. The most common treatment is the ketogenic diet, which is a high fat diet.

The ketogenic diet results in some general changes to the glucose metabolism in addition to a build up of ketone substances. Why these changes impede epileptic seizures in many patients remains unknown. Mogens Andreasen will therefore utilise the grant from the Riisfort Foundation to investigate how changes to the glucose metabolism affect epileptic seizures in brain tissue from rats.

"Studies have shown that the diet leads to general changes to the glucose metabolism (reduced glycolysis, increased oxidative phosphorylation) in which inhibition of the glycolysis appears to be able to reduce the seizures. The latter observation is, however, not well substantiated by the control of other factors and the correlation between specific metabolic changes and a reduced frequency of seizures is still unknown," explains Mogens Andreasen.

Mogens Andreasen hopes to come closer to an answer with the project ”Anti- and pro-convulsive mechanisms induced by 2-deoxy-D-glucose (2-DG) treatment in hippocampus proper”.

The ketogenic diet

The diet works because the body believes that it is in a state of fasting. Normally the brain burns glucose, but when the body thinks that it is fasting, the brain shifts from burning glucose to burning fatty acids. When fatty acids are broken down in the body, ketone bodies are formed which have been shown to have an inhibiting effect on epileptic seizures.

Further information

Associate Professor Mogens Andreasen
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine
Tel.: +45 8716 7718
ma@biomed.au.dk