Now I’m watching @ChrisPalmerMD who is making the case that metabolic disorder is an underlying cause of mental illness (I’m already a member of the choir here, obvs)
Some papers: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30254236/
People with diabetes are 2x more likely to have clinical depression and depression also worsens the outcomes of diabetes. Similar numbers and bidirectional relationship for cardiovascular disease (even after controlling for other modifiable risk factors like smoking)
About 50 years of research shows metabolic abnormalities in the brains of people with mental illness of all varieties…lactate, ATP/ADP, ROS, glucose metabolism and insulin irregularities (so problems with energy production/regulation and clean-up of metabolism byproducts)
Meta analysis of c reactive protein and bipolar disorder pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25742201/
Also lots of papers linking MDD to shorter telomeres ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Mortality of people with mental illness die earlier than paired cohorts without mental illness, primarily due to cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer (while suicide and ODs are an issue the first three have the most effect) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30649197/
Some of these ideas are being put into active research (for example using intranasal insulin in research for bipolar disorder) clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00…
Another study showing decrease in psych hospitalization and self harm in bipolar and schizophrenia treated with metabolic modifying meds jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…
Now off to nutritional psychiatry…go read my blog at psych today 😝 (helfimed trial (a bit weak) and SMILES (better)) psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolut…
And of course Dr. Palmer is a good source for papers on the research into ketogenic diets and psychiatric disorders scholar.google.com/scholar?q=palm…
I wrote a basic explainer of why it should be studied a while back psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolut…
Note that ketogenic diet is a well-established treatment for epilepsy but it is still emerging evidence for psychiatry
Ketogenic diet used in inpatient unit for alcohol withdrawal in a study vs standard care advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/15/e…
Another new pilot trial in use of ketogenic diet for Alzheimer’s alzres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
One important point: ketogenic diets here are used like they are in seizure disorder, as a metabolic intervention similar to a medicine. No cheat days. A cheat weekend would be the equivalent of going off your anti-epileptic med for the weekend.
Dr. Palmer has some case studies in the literature as well (note off label but these cases are in chronically ill who had failed trials of treatment as usual) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28162810/
And here is his website chrispalmermd.com
Here’s a website directed at ketogenic diet in epilepsy charliefoundation.org
Addressing a question about adherence and also contraindications:
https://twitter.com/evolutionarypsy/status/1403726436612071430
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