Sat, Jul-09-22, 11:06
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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The Ketogenic Diet for Refractory Mental Illness
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From Dr Georgia Ede:
I am very pleased to share a new open-access paper my colleagues and I just published in Frontiers in Psychiatry describing the potential benefits of a ketogenic diet in patients with bipolar disorder type two, major depression, and schizoaffective disorder: The Ketogenic Diet for Refractory Mental Illness: A Retrospective Analysis of 31 Inpatients (see below)
My friend and colleague Dr. Albert Danan is a seasoned psychiatrist practicing in Toulouse, France. The population he serves is comprised primarily of people of French and North African descent with serious, persistent mental illness, many of whom also suffer from metabolic illnesses such as obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. After witnessing marked improvement in seizures and autism behaviors in a family member within several weeks of having adopted a ketogenic diet, Dr. Danan became interested in the potential of the diet to improve the psychiatric and metabolic status of his most treatment-resistant patients, regardless of diagnosis. He created a metabolic psychiatry treatment program within his local hospital where patients with chronic mental illness who had exhausted standard psychiatric therapies could attempt a ketogenic diet in a supportive, medically supervised environment.
Our paper analyzing his observations found that this simple, whole-foods ketogenic diet protocol was safe, feasible to administer in a hospital setting, and associated with substantial improvements in psychiatric and metabolic health that Dr. Danan had not witnessed before in any of these patients, many of whom he had worked with for years or even decades. We are grateful to Dr. Eric Westman of Duke University and Dr. Laura Saslow of the University of Michigan for their expert contributions to the analysis and manuscript.
Until now, the evidence in support of ketogenic diets specifically for psychiatric conditions has been limited to hypothesis papers, animal studies, and a small but growing number of individual case reports. This was not a controlled trial, therefore we cannot be certain that the ketogenic diet was responsible for the outcomes. However, we believe this work bridges the gap between case reports and controlled clinical trials, which are already underway.
We hope that the good work of Dr. Danan and his patients will serve to reassure and encourage clinicians and patients around the world to learn more about this approach and to consider the ketogenic diet as a low-risk, high potential benefit tool that may substantially improve quality of life, reduce the need for psychiatric medication, and help counteract the metabolic side effects of psychiatric medication. To that end, we encourage you to share these findings with others.
We are grateful to report that our paper seems to be resonating with people, and in just two days it has already reached an Altmetric score of more than 800.
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Quote:
The Ketogenic Diet for Refractory Mental Illness: A Retrospective Analysis of 31 Inpatients
Background and Hypothesis: The robust evidence base supporting the therapeutic benefit of ketogenic diets in epilepsy and other neurological conditions suggests this same metabolic approach may also benefit psychiatric conditions.
Study Design: In this retrospective analysis of clinical care, 31 adults with severe, persistent mental illness (major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder) whose symptoms were poorly controlled despite intensive psychiatric management were admitted to a psychiatric hospital and placed on a ketogenic diet restricted to a maximum of 20 grams of carbohydrate per day as an adjunct to conventional inpatient care. The duration of the intervention ranged from 6 to 248 days.
Study Results: Three patients were unable to adhere to the diet for >14 days and were excluded from the final analysis. Among included participants, means and standard deviations (SDs) improved for the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale scores from 25.4 (6.3) to 7.7 (4.2), P < 0.001 and the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale from 29.6 (7.8) to 10.1 (6.5), P < 0.001. Among the 10 patients with schizoaffective illness, mean (SD) of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) scores improved from 91.4 (15.3) to 49.3 (6.9), P < 0.001. Significant improvements were also observed in metabolic health measures including weight, blood pressure, blood glucose, and triglycerides.
Conclusions: The administration of a ketogenic diet in this semi-controlled setting to patients with treatment-refractory mental illness was feasible, well-tolerated, and associated with significant and substantial improvements in depression and psychosis symptoms and multiple markers of metabolic health.
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The study can be read in full here: https://www.frontiersin.org/article...022.951376/full
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