Dr. Iain Campbell

And this is the largest study in the field to date, which is a kind of very robust way of trying to assess the effects of ketogenic diet versus a kind of standard dietary pattern.

in people with bipolar.

So we'll look at glucose levels, ketone levels and biomarkers that might be associated with a change in energy status in the body.

Again, in metabolic psychiatry, when you're looking at how energy and metabolism function in the brain, one of the most fundamental interventions you can make is to change the fuel source of the brain.

It's like if you had a car that has a diesel engine and an electric engine.

And if the diesel engine is malfunctioning, going into states of overdrive and sort of depressed function, perhaps you can change over to an alternative fuel source and this would be beneficial.

So we want to capture both the quantitative measures of mood assessment and we're also interested in interviewing patients and asking them about their lived experience of this intervention.

So the objective measures are very helpful in psychiatry in quantifying the change in psychiatric mood scores.

But also we want to understand as a patient, as a human being, what is their experience of life on this intervention?

Does it improve their quality of life and their kind of capacity to function and to really thrive as opposed to just being, getting by?

So there'll be a mix of primary measures will be quantitative measures like the PHQ-9 score, but we'll also interview patients to try and understand their experience.

I think the lived experience and science research really go hand in hand in many major breakthroughs in science or advancements in treatment and care.

You can see this in the application of ketogenic diet to epilepsy.

It was initially families whose children had epilepsy adhering to this ketogenic diet and reporting the effects as large patient communities that raised awareness about this and made it a mainstream treatment for epilepsy.

And this is kind of the unique aspect of metabolic psychiatry.

It's not coming from just a kind of conceptual idea or abstraction.

It's really coming from real patients who are sharing their experience on blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, case reports, case series, and now in clinical trials as well.

And so in the RCT we'll have a patient advisory group that's guiding the research and informing all aspects of the trial design and delivery.

And this really anchors the research in real patient experiences and their lives and their quality of life and what their family expect from them thriving and really finding treatment that really helps them to live a full life, not just surviving.

I think this is the real value of it.