Dr. Iain Campbell

I really stumbled on the ketogenic diet by accident.

I was trying to lose weight and I went on a low carbohydrate diet for weight loss and I had periods during this time when for the first time in my life I'd experienced these states of calm and clarity of thought and mood regulation that I'd never experienced before.

And it really came down to this dietary change I thought might be having an impact.

And I learned that this diet essentially induces periods of ketosis.

I was following a kind of mild form of ketogenic diet.

And the main adaptation is removing the refined carbohydrates and increasing the fat intake.

And this is a treatment that's been used in epilepsy for seizure reduction for over 100 years.

There's over 13 randomized controlled trials and a Cochrane review of the effectiveness of ketogenic diet as a seizure reduction tool in epilepsy.

And this is of particular interest to the bipolar community because we're treated by many anti-seizure medications, medications that came from epilepsy, such as carbamazepine, lamotrigine, valporate.

So this became much more interesting to me then because I could see the link between the current treatment strategies.

And this was the basis of our work.

research was then trying to understand could this be beneficial for other people and could this potentially be a treatment for bipolar and so we did a pilot study with 27 participants and this was it was a very long journey to get to this pilot study and a lot of patient effort and advocacy to raise awareness about this to make it a serious research priority

And so we also have to be humble in what we can say from a pilot study of 27 patients, but it did have very promising indications.

We saw significant weight reduction across the participants, 4.7 kilograms on average, and significant reductions in systolic blood pressure, which are indications of positive physical health effects.

But we also saw a correlation between ketone levels and improved daily mood outcomes and anxiety outcomes in patients that are measuring their mood and anxiety.

daily and tracking these against ketone level.

So the next stage is essentially RCTs, brain imaging studies and trying to look at what patients might benefit from this.

So we're looking to recruit 206 patients.

103 will be on the ketogenic diet and 103 will be on the NHS Eat Well diet.

So this is a kind of way of comparing the two diets to see is the effect of ketogenic diet uniquely beneficial or detrimental to people with bipolar disorder.