There are plenty of wacky 'fad diets' out there. The grapefruit and lemonade diets come to mind. But while fad diets are often bizarre, they're generally regarded as safe, right? Wrong -- fad diets can be downright dangerous, as this story proves.

A British woman, Dawn Page, was recently awarded £800,000 (about $1,600,000 USD) after a detox diet left her epileptic and brain damaged. 'The Amazing Hydration Diet' has participants drinking copious amounts of water and reducing their salt intake in order to cleanse their system and reduce water retention. But within days of starting the diet, Page started vomiting uncontrollably and was rushed to hospital.

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Did you ever see the movie Lorenzo's Oil? If you haven't, I highly recommend it. In short, it's about a young boy diagnosed with a rare disease. Ultimately, it's found that a special diet with certain fats helped him. I just stumbled across a news story that reminds me so much of that movie.

Ella, a six-year-old girl from the UK, was recently part of a clinical trial to test the effects of a ketogenic diet on epilepsy. Ella was healthy until her first birthday when she contracted pneumococcal meningitis. The severe infection left her with both hearing and learning difficulties. Later, after experiencing seizures, she was also diagnosed with epilepsy.

There was a brief, few months after her fourth birthday when Ella was free of seizures. The reprieve didn't last long, but it gave Ella's parents a chance to glimpse their daughter free of the debilitating seizures. That was the impetus for signing her up for the clinical trial.

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Those who suffer from epilepsy are quite a bit more likely to take their own lives according to a report out of Denmark this week.

The increased risk? About 300% over the normal population. And, the risk was five times the normal rate if diagnosis was half a year or less. Doctors were warned to watch those that had just been diagnosed with epilepsy, although I would think it is hard for "doctors to watch patients" -- unless I am missing something here.

The study looked at people who died of non-suicide causes between 1981 and 1997 and those who took their own life during the same period. That is when the suicide rate correlation was discovered. Going further, the report found that those who had been diagnosed recently with both a psychiatric illness and epilepsy had a suicide rate of 29 times the norm.

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Patients that suffer a traumatic brain injury, from motor vehicle accidents to war-injuries from Iraq, are at an increased risk for developing the seizure disorder epilepsy -- on top of the many challenges they already face. But time and energy are now being focused on this somewhat newly realized issue, and efforts are being made to both identify those who are at highest risk and then intervene to help them avoid it if possible.

Sadly, the technology isn't completely there yet, and doctors are often frustrated because they know a particular patient is at high risk but can do nothing about it. On the up side, however, experts are gaining a better understanding of the condition every day, and several new drugs are showing definite promise in studies.

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