It’s official: The ketogenic diet proved to be effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease (PKD) in the first randomized controlled clinical trial of ketogenic metabolic therapy for PKD.
“I’m really happy about these clinical trial results,” said UC Santa Barbara biologist Thomas Weimbs, whose lab was part of an international collaboration to investigate the effect of the fasting response known as ketosis on the cysts that are the hallmark of the disease.
“We now have the first evidence in humans that the cysts really don’t like to be in ketosis and that they don’t seem to grow,” he said.
The researchers’ study is published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine
Nurture Over Nature
For PKD patients, these findings represent an opportunity to control a genetic disease that leads to a progressive condition, causing pain and robbing them of their quality of life, and often resulting in the need for dialysis and kidney transplantation as the cysts destroy the kidneys’ ability to effectively filter and remove waste from the body.
“If you have PKD, the dogma is that it’s a genetic disease,” Weimbs said. “And no matter what you do, you progress toward kidney failure and diet doesn’t make any difference, which unfortunately most patients are told to this day.”
This prevailing belief was what the Weimbs Lab and colleagues from various research institutions in Germany set out to challenge with their trial.
Sixty-six PKD patients were recruited by the German research team headed by research physician Dr. Roman Müller of the University of Cologne and randomly split into three groups: a control group that received routine PKD counseling, another group that underwent a three-day water fast every month and a third group that observed a low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet.
The patients were followed closely with blood draws and MRI scans.
“To everyone’s great surprise, kidney function actually improved with the ketogenic diet … and that was a hard outcome of statistical significance.”
At the end of the three-month trial period, the researchers found that while the control group…