For those who have wondered if CBD oil for epilepsy might work, there is a recent study (February 2016) published in the journal, “Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy,” that gives very good reason to think it would.
The study involved seventy-four Israeli children and adolescents, ranging in age from one to eighteen. All had been diagnosed with “intractable epilepsy,” also called “refractory epilepsy.” These medical terms mean that their epilepsy could not be controlled with prescription medications and other common methods used in traditional medicine to treat epilepsy.
All seventy-four participants in the study had been unresponsive to more than SEVEN different prescription drugs. Furthermore, in sixty-six percent of the participants, neither a ketogenic diet nor implanting a a vagal nerve stimulator had helped either.
A ketogenic diet is a diet high in fact, low in carbohydrate, and with a adequate amount of protein. Obviously, this is a hard diet to stay on long term, especially for young people, with so many carbohydrate temptations everywhere. Think about how hard a birthday party would be! Nevertheless, the goal of the ketogenic diet is force the body to metabolize food in such a way that the brain must use ketones for fuel rather than glucose. For some epileptics, this very difficult diet, if strictly adhered to, can reduce or prevent seizures.
A vagal nerve stimulator is similar to a pace maker in that it sends mild electrical impulses out at constant intervals. However, instead of sending electrical impulses to the heart to regulate the heart beat, the vagal nerve stimulator sends electrical impulses to the brain via the vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body. The vagus nerve runs from the brain to the torso, serving most of the internal organs along the way. To insert the vagal nerve stimulator, surgery is necessary, and it often doesn’t end up working. Some of the side effects include pain, numbness, a tingling sensation, shortness of breath, higher frequency of infection, memory loss, and depression. Needless to say, it’s a rather extreme measure and whether of not to put their child through this is a very difficult decision for any parent to make. Generally, this measure is only taken if a child’s seizures are very bad and they can’t be controlled with prescription drugs.
Overall, it seems that using CBD oil for epilepsy would be a much easier method to use to control epileptic seizures in children. Furthermore, placing drops of CBD oil under the tongue of a child once or twice a day (or using dabs, capsules, etc) seems like it would be a much easier method than trying to get a child to actually stay on a ketogenic diet, especially long term. Giving CBD oil is also non-invasive, requiring no surgery, and given all the buzz about using CBD oil for epilepsy on the internet, no one (or very few) seems to be talking about experiencing any side effects from it.
But…. does CBD oil work for epilepsy? To answer this question, let’s look at the results of the seventy-four Israeli children:
After receiving CBD oil for at least three months and an average of six months, eighty-nine percent of the children experienced a reduction in seizures!!!
EIGHTY-NINE PERCENT REDUCTION IN EPILEPTIC SEIZURES SEEMS LIKE A REMARKABLE RESULT THAT OUGHT TO BE A HEADLINE STORY ACROSS ALL THE MEDIA!
Now, let’s break down these remarkable results even further:
– Eighteen percent of the children (13 of them) had a seventy-five to one hundred percent decrease in seizures…. WOW!
– Thirty-four percent of the children (25 of them) had a fifty to seventy-five percent decrease in seizures…. also WOW!
– Twelve percent of the children (9 of them) had a twenty-five to fifty percent decrease in seizures… still a very good result!
– Nineteen percent of the children (19 of them) had either less than a twenty-five percent decrease in seizures or had no difference in seizure frequency. This is a mixed result and some of these children may have seen a more significant result using CBD oil if they have been given the CBD oil for a longer time or perhaps taken a higher dosage of CBD each day.
A few more points should be made about this study:
– The participants were given a low-THC CBD oil with a ratio of 20:1 CBD (cannabidiol) to THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). The focus of the study was to see if CBD could help reduce epileptic seizures, not THC. No one was trying to get these children high!
– Five out of seventy-four children in this study did experience fairly mild problems which may or may not have been due to the CBD oil. These included drowsiness, irritability, and gastrointestinal issues. However, even if these symptoms were due to the CBD oil, they certainly don’t rise to the level of the much harsher symptoms experienced by a very significant percentage of children who take prescription drugs for epilepsy. Further, adjusting the dosage and or using a CBD oil with an even lower amount of THC, like the CBD oil we sell which only has trace amounts of THC, might eliminate these relatively mild issues.
– The dosage of CBD varied widely, from 1 to 20 milligrams per kilograms of body weight per day. If the dosage of CBD had been increased in some children, these amazing results may have been even better! Of course, a follow-up study investigating more thoroughly the dosage is warranted!
– If you should be inspired by this research study to try using CBD oil to control epileptic seizures, you can start with a small dosage and then increase it as necessary.
So to review, more than half of the children given CBD oil for an average of six months saw at least a fifty percent reduction in their epileptic seizures! Furthermore, the CBD oil seemed to significantly reduce epileptic seizures in eighty-nine percent of the children!
The research on using CBD oil to reduce epileptic seizures seems very promising. Check out our article on how a father in Australia is using medical cannabis to help his little girl when nothing else would work. In fact, she was in jeopardy of dying from thousands of seizures, and since taking medical cannabis, she has not had a significant seizure in ten months! Their story also inspired the biggest donation for medical cannabis research the world has ever seen!
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