Epileptics Warned of Water-Related Diet Perils

Diet plans that include drinking large amounts of water may trigger seizures in epileptic patients, a neurologist at Stanford University has warned.

Dr. James C. White said recently that he is alerting doctors to the possible dangers of water-related diets because of their popularity in recent years and because water has long been considered a cause of seizures in epileptics.

“Around the time of World War II, one of the techniques used to prove whether a person having attacks was an epileptic was to give him large quantities of water to induce a seizure,” White said.

“The doctors would then run an EEG (electroencephalogram) to try to prove whether the patient had epilepsy. It’s believed that normal people won’t undergo seizures with moderately high amounts of water.”

White, a teacher at Stanford Medical Center, published his warning in the New England Journal of Medicine.

He said in the article that he had recently observed grand mal seizures in three patients who were following a diet advocating the drinking of eight to 12 eight-ounce glasses of water per day.

One of the patients was a 34-year-old woman who had never suffered a major seizure until starting the water diet. Another patient, 33, had genetically determined epilepsy but had no major seizures for three years until the diet.

The third patient, 21, had suffered seizures as a child as a result of fever but had not had a seizure for five years until starting the diet.

Since writing the article, White said, he has seen a fourth epileptic on that diet have a grand mal seizure.

“I want to emphasize that we really haven’t proven anything,” White said. “We just want to raise a question and suggest that other doctors ought to take a closer look at their epileptic patients on such diets.”

White also said non-epileptic patients do not appear to be at risk of having seizures as a result of drinking moderately large amounts.