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.…  read on >  read on >

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.…  read on >  read on >

Blood tests showed he had a life-threatening allergic reaction  read on >

A rare tick-spread “meat allergy” has now been tied to its first confirmed death, according to researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine (UVA). Doctors reported that a healthy 47-year-old New Jersey man died in 2024 after eating beef, with symptoms starting four hours after his meal. The cause of death was unclear until UVA allergist Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, who first discovered the condition, reviewed blood samples and confirmed the man had a severe reaction linked to alpha-gal syndrome, often dubbed “meat allergy.” The allergy develops after a bite from the Lone Star tick, which can make the body react to alpha-gal, a sugar found in beef, pork, lamb and other mammalian meats.  Many people experience hives, nausea or stomach pain, but experts have long feared that fatalities were possible. “The important information for the public is: First, that severe abdominal pain occurring three to five hours after eating beef, pork or lamb should be investigated as a possible episode of anaphylaxis; and, second, that tick bites that itch for more than a week or larvae of ticks often called ‘chiggers’ can induce or increase sensitization to mammalian-derived meat,” said Platts-Mills, a world-renowned allergist. “On the other hand, most individuals who have mild to moderate episodes of hives can control symptoms with an appropriate diet,” he added in a news release. The New…  read on >  read on >