A team from the Department of Neurology at the University of California has found a new way to reduce the frequency of epileptic seizures in patients who no longer respond to drug treatment: ingest a small dose of omega 3 daily.
Present in fatty fish and vegetable oils, as well as in the form of a food supplement, omega 3 could indeed reduce the number of epileptic seizures in people with this disease.
Seizure frequency reduced by more than 30%
For their study, the scientists used 24 participants with epilepsy, on whom drug treatments were no longer having an effect.
Each patient was subjected to three types of dietary supplements, each of which had to be taken for 10 consecutive weeks, and spaced 6 weeks apart.
The experiment included a supplement containing a low dose ofomega 3 (3 times a day, or 1.08 mg/day), a high-dose omega-3 supplement (six times a day, or 2.16 mg/day), and a supplement containing only placebo.
The study then showed that the lowest number of seizures (12 per month) was observed when patients took the low-dose omega-3 supplement. Taking the high-dose omega-3 supplement resulted in 17 seizures per month, while the placebo was synonymous with 18 attacks per month.
Thus, taking the supplement containing a low dose of omega 3 resulted in a 33.6% drop in the number of epileptic seizures.
On the other hand, two of the 24 patients had no seizures when taking this same low dose.
An explanation of the researchers would reside in the fact that omega 3 would have a positive effect on blood pressure and therefore on the cardiovascular risk, very high and synonymous with seizures in people with epilepsy.
“While our study requires confirmation by other work, the magnitude of the effect of low doses of omega 3 on the frequency of epileptic seizures is the same as antiepileptic medical treatments. rejoice the researchers.
Source:
Omega-3 fish oil ‘could reduce seizure frequency for epilepsy patients’, Medical News Today.