Influência da dieta cetogênica rica em triacilgliceróis de cadeia média e longa sobre a propagação da depressão alastrante cortical em ratos.

Abstract

The ketogenic diet is high fat, low carbohidrate and protein. This kind of diet is used to treatment of a lot of disease, especially epilepsy, because their ability to interfere on body metabolism and cerebral excitability. This work contains two articles. The first one is a review of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of action of the ketogenic diet on the reduction of cerebral electrical activity to improve the seizures. The second one is an experimental study which aims to analyze the interference of two kinds of ketogenic diet on the cerebral excitability. One of diets used was the classical ketogenic diet, composed by long chain triglycerides with polyunsaturated fatty acids, soy oil, widely used to treatment of epilepsy; the other one was composed by triglycerides of the enantic acid, seven molecules of carbon, the triheptanoin, which is metabolized faster and well accepted by the organism, used to clinical treatment of disorders of pyruvate carboxilase enzyme and long chain fatty acid oxidation. In order to analyze the cerebral electric activity we used the Spreading Depression feature. The Spreading Depression is a phenomenon that occurs in the nervous system and when trigged at cerebral cortex leads to a reduction of neuronal activity which spreads slowly, with velocity of 2-5 mm/min, to all regions of the cerebral cortex. A burst of neuronal electrical activity similar to that found in epileptic EEG occurs during the initial phase of spreading depression. Because theirs characteristics this phenomenon had been widely used to study brain functionality.