Pilot Study Shows Ketogenic Diet Improves Severe Mental Illness

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-ketogenic-diet-severe-mental-illness.html

For people living with serious mental illnesses 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.

Now, a pilot study led by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that a ketogenic diet not only restores metabolic health in these patients as they continue their medications but it further improves their psychiatric conditions. The results, published in Psychiatry Research, suggest that dietary intervention can be a powerful aid in treating mental illness.

"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," said Shebani Sethi, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the first author of the new paper.

The senior author of the paper is Laura Saslow, Ph.D., associate professor of health behavior and biological sciences at the University of Michigan.

Sethi, who is board-certified in obesity and psychiatry, remembers when she first noticed the connection. As a medical student working in an obesity clinic, she saw a patient with treatment-resistant schizophrenia whose auditory hallucinations quieted on a ketogenic diet.

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.

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