Ketogenic diet can prevent cognitive decline: study

WASHINGTON: A study in mice could boost cognitive abilities as a result of a ketogenic diet – a diet rich in fats and carbohydrates. Researchers at the University of Kentucky in the United States have shown that the gut and brain are more closely related than previously thought and that the health of one can affect the other.

"Neurovascular integrity, including cerebral blood flow and blood-brain barrier function, plays a major role in cognitive abilities," said Ai-Ling Lin, of the University of Kentucky.

"Recent scientific studies suggest that bacterial integrity may be regulated by intestinal bacteria, so we investigated whether the ketogenic diet improved cerebrovascular function and reduced the risk of neurodegeneration in healthy young mice" Lin said.

The ketogenic diet has already shown positive effects in patients with other neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Parkinson's disease and autism.

For the study published in Scientific Reports, two groups of nine mice aged 12 to 14 weeks received either the ketogenic diet (KD) or a balanced diet.

After 16 weeks, the researchers found a significant increase in cerebral blood flow in KD mice, an improvement in the microbiome balance in the intestine, a decrease in blood glucose and body weight, as well as in the 39, a beneficial increase in the process of elimination of beta amyloid of the brain. – a characteristic of Alzheimer's disease.

"While diet changes, including the ketogenic diet, have been shown to be effective in treating certain diseases, we have chosen to test healthy young mice using the diet as a potential preventative measure," Lin said. .

"We are delighted to see that we could actually use a diet to mitigate the risk of Alzheimer's disease," she said.

According to Lin, the observed beneficial effects of the ketogenic diet are potentially due to the inhibition of a nutrient sensor called mTOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin), which has proven effective in prolonging the duration of life and promote health. According to Lin, in addition to the ketogenic diet, mTOR can also be inhibited by simple calorie restriction or by pharmaceutical rapamycin.

Another study, published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, used neuroimaging techniques to explore in vivo the effects of rapamycin, the ketogenic diet or a simple calorie restriction on the cognitive function of young and elderly mice .

"Our previous work had already demonstrated the positive effect that rapamycin and caloric restriction had on neurovascular function.We hypothesized that neuroimaging could allow us to see these changes in the living brain", Lin said.

The data suggest that caloric restriction functioned as a kind of "fountain of youth" for aging rodents, which had better neurovascular and metabolic functions than young mice with unrestricted diets.

The researchers point out that it is too early to know if treatment regimens will confer the same benefit in humans, but as rapamycin and other mTOR inhibitors have already been approved by the FDA and are widely prescribed for other diseases, a study in humans could follow fairly quickly.

All methods used by researchers in animal models can be easily applied to humans.