A Włodarczyk, MS Wiglusz and WJ Cubała,
Medical hypotheses , Sep 2018
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that mostly appears in the second or third decade of life with no consistent appearance. The first-line pharmacological treatment are antipsychotic drugs, which mainly act by suppressing the activity of dopamine. Unfortunately many of schizophrenic patients suffer from persistent positive or negative symptoms that cannot be fully treated with available medication. With exploration on the possible causes of the disease there is evidence on dopaminergic transmission defects, there is a need to find more holistic way in treating the disease and a diet regimen could be one of them. Ketogenic diet, which is a popular diet regimen that consists in low-carbohydrate (about 30-50 g/day), medium-protein (up to 1 g/kg daily) and high-fat intake (around 80% of daily calories) mainly known for its helpful role in weight-loss. The key mechanism is to generate ketosis. A state in which ketones bodies in the blood provides energy part of the body's energy comes from ketone bodies in the blood. Possible hypothesis can be that ketogenic diet changes the ratio of GABA:glutamate in favor of GABA, by suppressing the catabolism and increasing the synthesis of GABA as well as glutamate metabolism, which could help to compensate the disrupted GABA levels in schizophrenic brain, leading to possible better outcome of the disease regarding symptomatology and preventing the weight-gain regarding some medications used and the correlating diseases responsible for weight gain.
Full article https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.mehy.2018.06.022
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Full disclosure everyone: this is a hypothesis, not a study. That means there was no test done to determine whether a ketogenic diet actually helps psychosis.
star, Psychosis and Schizophrenia are 2 completely different things.
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Schizophrenia is a subset of psychosis, actually.
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That’s not true.
Psychosis is just a symptom of Schizophrenia.
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It does say ‘medical hypotheses’ as part of the title but I agree some may not have been able to join the dots. Thanks for adding the disclosure which makes things clearer for people.
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Yeah, I thought it was very clear, but some folks might not know what a hypothesis is. Thanks for posting!
ola
July 25, 2018, 2:37pm
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very intresting. so manly diet is chocolat?
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Ketogenic diets are designed to be very low in sugar of any kind. So no, chocolate wouldn’t work. Even one small cheat, such as a single hard candy in a month, can destroy the whole diet.
ivona
July 25, 2018, 3:36pm
11
Yes, this works. I am on ketogenic diet almost 7 months. I lost 30kg. I feel better mentally and recently start running.
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Check it out, they’re working on a drug to recreate the effects of a ketogenic diet.
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