A small clinical trial found that the metabolic effects of a ketogenic diet may help stabilize the brain.
For people living with serious mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, standard treatment with antipsychotic medications can be a double-edged sword. While these drugs help regulate brain chemistry, they often cause metabolic side effects such as insulin resistance and obesity, which are distressing enough that many patients stop taking the medications.
That prompted her to dig into the medical literature. There were only a few, decades-old case reports on using the ketogenic diet to treat schizophrenia, but there was a long track record of success in using ketogenic diets to treat epileptic seizures. The research team tracked how well the participants followed the diet through weekly measures of blood ketone levels. By the end of the trial, 14 patients had been fully adherent, six were semi-adherent and only one was non-adherent.The participants underwent a variety of psychiatric and metabolic assessments throughout the trial.
The psychiatric benefits were also striking. On average, the participants improved 31% on a psychiatrist rating of mental illness known as the clinical global impressions scale, with three-quarters of the group showing clinically meaningful improvement. Overall, the participants also reported better sleep and greater life satisfaction.
"Anything that improves metabolic health in general is probably going to improve brain health anyway," Sethi said."But the ketogenic diet can provide ketones as an alternative fuel to glucose for a brain with energy dysfunction."
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