amergin -- Hutchinson has an earlier post in which McCleary is quoted, giving a reference in Neurobiology of Aging (2004, 25:311-314).

That was the first clinical trial of a formulation that contained a SINGLE medium chain triglyceride. The researchers who published this paper have developed a new formulation that contains some other things (they wouldn't tell me what!) to optimize performance, and they have conducted double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials of this formulation. They haven't published the data yet.

However ... the data HAS been submitted to the FDA, and the formulation has already received FDA approval, for treating Alzheimer's. (???How on earth could a new med for treating Alzheimer's get approved, and nobody has noticed??? You have no idea how much work it took, for me to get from all the "rising level of internet noise" to finding out about the approval!)

The company that has conducted all the studies hopes to launch the formulation early next year. It will be called "Axona".

You may be interested in the paper by Henderson Keytone bodies as a Therapeutic for Alzheimer's that can be downloaded from the link where it says Download Article in the bottom left hand of the page.

Doctor says Coconut oil lessened Alzheimer's effects on her husband Someone on another thread here posted a link to this newspaper article recently but you may have missed it.

As has been pointed out earlier Coconut oil contains over 60% Medium Chain Triglycerides. Maybe not a refined as in MCT oil or as specialized as the new therapeutic food/drug, but then it's more readily available and cheaper and a couple of tablespoons daily will probably help with weight loss and when used to fry the onions does make a good base for a tasty curry. I've used MCT as a salad oil but it's very expensive and difficult to find in the UK.

Thanks folks, it seems the message is slowly getting out there. Hopefully if there is anything to it it will snowball over the next few months and years.

"Regarding the "secret formulation" above this looks to my cynical eyes like maybe they are deliberately not testing the simple solution of Coconut Oil or commercially available MCT. Perhaps because these freely available items could not be patented and so there's no profit.
The "secret mix" is what got the FDA approval, and so this will be a prescription only patented earner for them.

Doing a web search for "ketasyn" gets a few thousand hits but most seem to be variations on the same story when Ketasyn research published in June/July 2007.


Re "Doctor says Coconut oil lessened Alzheimer's effects on her husband Someone on another thread here posted a link to this newspaper article recently but you may have missed it."
http://www.tampabay.com/news/aging/article879333.ece

It was me that posted the story.
Unfortunately most of the subsequent posts drifted from the main reason I posted it. Which was that it did NOT involve a "traditional" Very Low Carb/High Fat ketogenic diet. Making it a potentially very accessible option for home trial.
In fact the Doctor in the article said she had added the coconut oil into her husband's oatmeal every morning.

Thanks for your inputs here. This seems to be a line of inquiry still in it's infancy. One can only hope it will improve our understanding for the better as it grows.

The same is happening in D3 research where there is money to be made from analogues of D3 that can be patented and therefore be profitable but no profit in the natural form. Therefore the continual need to overstate the supposed "dangers" of using an "unlicensed" form.


Sorry to fail to attribute correctly but although I remembered the article I didn't remember the poster and didn't have time to track it down. Apologies.

But in the mean time I think we have urgently to promote low carbohydrate diets as a way of reducing obesity and recognise coconut oil and MCT oil have a role to play in providing an ideal source of brain/muscle fuel to wean us off our dependence on refined carbohydrates.

It is better to prevent dementia than to develop ways of of treating it however successfully.

Thanks for the link, but it's not the one I was looking for. Someone actually pasted a full article on another thread here, written by Dr Newport herself, and it's much more detailed than the Tampabay.com article ... but I didn't see a link.

I could get some ideas about the other constituents in Axona from some of the patent applications that have been recently published, just not the full details -- some sort of carnitine to improve fatty acid metabolism, things like that.

More interesting to me is that the clinical trial data show that, on average, MCTs do not work nearly as well in people with the APOE4 allele. The people at Accera think that they may understand why, from genetic clues, and that there may be a simple way to fix that. (But if I keep bugging Henderson for more info, he'll never get his newest publication written.)

His mother died of Alzheimer's, by the way, and it was watching her suffer that made him decide to change his career and see what he could do to help AD patients. There was a newspaper article about him several years ago.

Y'all might be very interested in one of Dr Henderson's earlier papers: Henderson ST. 2004. High carbohydrate diets and Alzheimer's disease. Med Hypotheses. 2004;62(5):689-700. It's loooooong and information-dense, but very well-written.

Hi,
just wanted to let you know that i tried MCT and coconut oil when i was in ketosis for a month and lost weight which wasnt going away even with Atkin's Induction.

But the trouble in my opininon is that once you decide to get to maintenance and 60-80g which I am now eating saturated fat is counter productive.
As you increase carbs you need to decrease fat.

So I dont use it anymore but plan to use it whenever i want to be in ketosis.

My son does Atkins for epilepsy and MCT oil is vital in keeping his seizures at bay. He takes a tablespoon with every meal and this gets him in a very very deep ketosis. The MCT is very ketogenic and it is used specifically for getting ketones as high as possible - because usually the best seizure controll comes from high levels of ketones. Dr.s add MCT oil to the diet of kids who have a hard time getting into deep ketosis. BTW, my son has GAINED 30 pounds after adding this.

To me, it makes more sense to gain weight on this. I probably would have used it when I was younger in hopes of gaining...I was so skinny. I can't imagine getting skinnier that what I was. I just made a coconut with a glurb of MCT, strawberry smoothie. It is my special treat before I turn in tonight.

My dad could have been helped with his seizures on MCT oil.