Therapeutic Use Of Ketosis For Neurological Disorders

A Ketogenic Diet Can Have A Profound Impact On Reducing Neurological Inflammation.

The following are just a few short summaries of interesting recent papers that show significant benefits for adopting a ketogenic diet for neurological disorders.

The ketogenic diet provides several advantages for neurological disorders.

Ketosis improves metabolic factors, reducing insulin resistance, and improving energy production. It also reduces inflammation, including neurological inflammation. Ketosis will minimize blood sugar fluctuations that cause metabolic problems in the brain (and elsewhere).

A 2017, paper in molecular metabolism entitled, “Dietary sugars, not lipids, drive hypothalamic inflammation” discusses increased microglial reactivity and increased cytokine production driving hypothalamic inflammation due to sugar resulting in hypothalamic dysfunction.

A 2017, review paper entitled,”Bioenergetic regulation of microglia” discusses how beta-hydroxybutyrate (elevated on a ketogenic diet) inhibits certain enzymes and activates specific microglial receptors which reduce microglial activation after brain injury and promote neuro-protective miscroglial types.

A ketogenic diet reduces insulin which reduces neuroinflammatory RAGE reaction. This was discussed in a December 2018, Volume 12 article in Frontiers of Neuoscience.

Specifically a good example that virtually everyone is aware of would be ketogenic diets reducing incidence of epileptic seizures.

A July 2017, paper in Neurochemistry Research entitled, “Ketone bodies as anti-seizure agents” repots that ketone bodies exert neuroprotective effects both through epigenetic and anti-inflammatory mechanisms which attenuate over-excitable brain networks.

An interesting paper in cell entitled, “The gut microbiota mediates the anti-seizure effects of a ketogenic diet.” The paper finds changes in the microbiota are required for the anti-seizure effects of the diet and that the ketogenic diet based microbiota regulate hippocampal GABA and glutamate.

There are, of course, many other papers but this provides some research that really strongly supports the use of a ketogenic diet for neurological inflammation.