The common antipsychotic medication used for severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder might have unintended consequences. Although these medications aid in the regulation of brain chemistry, they frequently result in metabolic adverse effects, such as obesity and insulin resistance, which are so upsetting that many patients cease taking them.
According to a recent pilot study conducted by doctors at Stanford Medicine, a ketogenic diet helps these individuals’ mental health in addition to restoring their metabolic health while they continue their drug regimen. The findings, which were released in Psychiatry Research, indicate that nutritional interventions can be quite effective in addressing mental health conditions.
“It’s very promising and 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 behavioural sciences and the first author of the new paper.
The senior author of the paper is Laura Saslow, PhD, associate professor of health behaviour 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.
“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.” A few years later, 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 disorder, taking antipsychotic medications, and had a metabolic abnormality—such as weight gain, insulin resistance, hypertriglyceridemia, dyslipidaemia or impaired glucose tolerance. The participants were instructed to follow a ketogenic diet, with approximately 10 per cent of the calories from carbohydrates, 30 per cent from protein and 60 per cent from fat. They were not told to count calories. “The focus of eating is on whole non-processed foods including protein and non-starchy vegetables, and not restricting fats,” said Sethi, who shared keto-friendly meal ideas with the participants. They were also given keto cookbooks and access to a health coach. Source: ANI