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Home » Diet » Successful diet eases Mansfield boy's seizures and sparks fundraiser

Posted: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 4:09 pm | Updated: 6:30 pm, Tue Mar 6, 2012.

MANSFIELD A high-fat diet that would make a fitness guru cringe is proving to be a lifesaver for a township boy who has epilepsy.

An average meal for Korey Walton is a dollop of scrambled eggs, a strip of bacon, and two nickel-size slivers of a banana. Another typical meal is pork roll and cheese with no bun and four tiny Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers. A snack is a slab of butter with some peanut butter on the side.

Each meal must be washed down with 60 grams of heavy 6 percent cream, specially ordered from Wawa.

Since Korey, 8, began a ketogenic diet in January, his seizures have stopped and he's slowly becoming more energetic and engaged, his caretakers say.

"You see his personality coming out. He's talking, he's laughing and he's able to focus," said Lynn Schaefer, the nurse at Mansfield Township Elementary School.

Korey's mother, Dawn, said her son had tried numerous medicines to control his seizures since being diagnosed at age 4. The problem is that they stop working after about three months, she said. Korey seized from five to 50 times a day, the episodes lasting anywhere from 15 seconds to two minutes.

The family hit another roadblock in September, when Korey went to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for an operation to remove a part of his brain that causes the seizures. Doctors discovered more trouble spots and ruled out the surgery, Walton said.

Finally, Korey went back to CHOP in January for a week to try out the ketogenic diet, a plan comprised of 90 percent fat, 7 percent protein and 3 percent carbohydrates. The diet forces the body to burn fat rather than glucose, a state known as ketosis, and mimics what the body does when deprived of food. The diet's use by epileptic patients is rooted in the 80-year-old discovery that seizures could be prevented by fasting, according to the Epilepsy Foundation of Landover, Md.

About 21 percent of patients remained seizure-free on a ketogenic diet, while about 62 percent of patients had the number of seizures reduced by half, according to CHOP studies. The hospital treats about 6,000 epilepsy patients each year, according to a CHOP representative.

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Successful diet eases Mansfield boy's seizures and sparks fundraiser

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Home » Diet » Successful diet eases Mansfield boy's seizures and sparks fundraiser