NEW YORK, April 17 (UPI) -- New York researchers suggest a high-ketogenic caloric diet may prevent the progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease.
"The findings assert the significance of certain high-caloric dietary intake in the prevention of ALS," said lead author Dr. Giulio Maria Pasinetti, director of the Neuroinflammation Research Center at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "In view of any available therapeutic application for the disease, this new evidence might bring hope to those affected."
Blood ketones were more than 3.5 times higher in the ketogenic-diet fed animals compared to controls, and the ketogenic-diet fed mice lost 50 percent of baseline motor performance 25 days later than the disease controls.
The ketogenic diet, often used with children with epilepsy, is a strict regimen in which each meal has about four times as much fat as protein or carbohydrate, and the amounts of food and liquid at each meal have to be carefully worked out and weighed for each meal.
The findings are published in BMC Neuroscience.
