Charlie is a son of the famous American film director Jim Abrahams. When Charlie was one year old, he had numerous daily seizures. No medication for epilepsy helped, and he had also had an unsuccessful brain surgery. But everything changed when he came to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was cured of his epilepsy by the ketogenic diet. The diet was undertaken despite resistance from the five pediatric neurologists he had seen.
When Charlie’s parents realized that Charlie was but one of hundreds of thousands of children whose families were either not being informed, or being misinformed about dietary therapy, they started in 1994 The Charlie Foundation in order to raise awareness about the ketogenic diet as a treatment for childhood epilepsy.
On April 2, 2008 Charlie Abrahams, whose epilepsy had been cured by the ketogenic diet, addressed an audience of over 300 scientists, neurologists, dietitians, and nurses at the first “International Symposium on Dietary Therapy for Epilepsy and Other Neurological Disorders.” He presented an award to Millicent Kelly, R.D. the Johns Hopkins dietitian who taught his family the diet.
The high-fat ketogenic diet can dramatically reduce or completely eliminate debilitating seizures in most children with infantile spasms, whose seizures persist despite medication, according to a Johns Hopkins Children’s Center study published in 2010 in the journal Epilepsia.
Hong AM, Turner Z, Hamdy RF, Kossoff EH. Infantile spasms treated with the ketogenic diet: Prospective single-center experience in 104 consecutive infants. Epilepsia 2010; 51 (8): 1403–1407.