The ketogenic diet can be used successfully in combination with corticosteroids for epileptic encephalopathies

Hormonal therapy or ketogenic diet often permits overcoming the challenging periods of many epileptic encephalopathies (West and Lennox–Gastaut syndromes and encephalopathy with continuous spike–waves in slow sleep), but relapse affects over 20% of patients. We report here a monocenter pilot series of 42 consecutive patients in whom we combined oral steroids with the ketogenic diet for corticosteroid-resistant or -dependent epileptic encephalopathy. We retrospectively evaluated the effect on seizure frequency, interictal spike activity, neuropsychological course, and steroid treatment course.