A small clinical trial led by Stanford Medicine found that the metabolic effects of a ketogenic diet may help stabilise the brain
TBS Report
08 April, 2024, 10:25 pm
Last modified: 08 April, 2024, 10:40 pm
A small clinical trial led by Stanford Medicine found that the metabolic effects of a ketogenic diet may help stabilise the brain. Photo: Collected
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A small clinical trial led by Stanford Medicine found that the metabolic effects of a ketogenic diet may help stabilise the brain. Photo: Collected
A ketogenic diet not only restores metabolic health in patients with severe mental illness as they continue their medications, but it further improves their psychiatric conditions, according to a recent study by Stanford Medicine researchers.
The results, published on 27 March in Psychiatry Research, suggest that a dietary intervention can be a powerful aid in treating mental illness, reports the Stanford Medicine News Center.
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, according to the report.
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Shebani Sethi, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences and the first author of the new paper, said, “It’s very promising and very encouraging that you can take back control of your illness in some way, aside from the usual standard of care.”
“The ketogenic diet has been proven to be effective for treatment-resistant epileptic seizures by reducing the excitability of neurons in the brain,” Sethi said. “We thought it would be worth exploring this treatment in psychiatric conditions.”
Sethi coined the term metabolic psychiatry, a new field that approaches mental health from an energy conversion perspective.
In the four-month pilot trial, Sethi’s team followed 21 adult participants who were diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar…