• Posted November 17, 2025

Keto Diet Stops A Young Girl's Epileptic Seizures

Alana “Lani” Silverberg was a real firecracker with a big personality at age 3 — until she started having seizures.

The sweetheart swiftly turned quiet, cranky, sleepless and fatigued, worn down by her seizures.

“It was every parent’s nightmare. Lani was having one large seizure a week. At one point, we didn’t know what else we were going to do,” her mom, Sara Silverberg, said in a news release.

But Lani now is free from seizures, thanks to a keto diet recommended by her doctors at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore.

“We knew it was a possibility there was a cure with the diet, but it feels like a miracle,” Silverberg said.

Lani’s first sign of seizures occurred when she was eating a cookie and started turning blue.

A Johns Hopkins pediatric neurologist, Dr. Eric Kossoff, diagnosed Lani with Doose syndrome, a rare type of childhood epilepsy that affects the whole brain. These seizures can cause developmental delays or plateaus if left untreated.

Further testing revealed that Lani was having nearly 40 seizures a day. These included drop seizures, which cause the body to go limp, and absence seizures that resemble zoning out with eyelids fluttering.

Lani was put on medication and given a helmet to protect her during major seizures.

Then Kossoff recommended a treatment that surprised Lani’s parents — the ketogenic diet.

Keto diets involve consuming high-fat foods and very low levels of carbs and are one of the oldest treatments for epilepsy, according to Johns Hopkins.

Its pediatric epilepsy team has used a keto diet to treat more than 1,500 children since 1994, but its use dates back as far as 1921, doctors said.

“We know that children with Doose syndrome do incredibly well with diet therapy, which is why she was referred in immediately to try the diet,” Kossoff said in a news video released by Johns Hopkins.

More than half of children who start a keto diet have at least a 50% reduction in their number of seizures, and as many as 15% become seizure-free, according to the Epilepsy Foundation.

Lani was admitted to Johns Hopkins Children’s center for three days to start this prescription diet, which requires strict compliance and weighing of foods to be successful.

While there, she and her parents learned how to incorporate the diet into her life. The Silverbergs keep kosher, but experts said the keto diet can be adapted to any religion or cultural preference.

Just one month after starting the keto diet, Lani’s seizures stopped and she began acting like her normal self again.

“We put her on the diet and she did incredibly well,” Kossoff said. “Her seizures stopped very quickly. We were able to take her off all her seizure medicine.” 

After two years, in April 2025, Kossoff told the family Lani could stop the diet. The family celebrated with a “sugar party,” complete with a piñata.

Kossoff does not expect Lani to have another seizure, based on research and clinical experience.

“That there are children like Lani out there, that with changing their diet we can stop their seizures, cure them, and they can go on and never need to see us again is just absolutely wonderful,” Kossoff said.

More information

The Epilepsy Foundation has more on the keto diet for seizure treatment.

SOURCE: Johns Hopkins Medicine, news release, Nov. 11, 2025