A diet rich in fat and low carbohydrate diet known as the ‘ketogenic’ The recovery is accelerated in rats paralyzed after a spinal cord injury, according to new research.The results were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world’s largest source of emerging news on brain science and health. More than 10,000 North Americans suffer from spinal cord injuries each new year and more than one million people live with such damage.
‘Our results suggest that a ketogenic diet may be appropriate initial therapy to improve outcomes in humans with spinal cord injuries,’ said Wolfram Tetzlaff, MD, Ph.D., international collaboration on Repair Discoveries, and lead author of the the study. ‘While there are still many unanswered questions and further research is needed, initial results of these experiments on animals justify human experimentation.’
In this study, the researchers studied the ketogenic diet as an alternative to fasting. As is the case of fasting, the lack of carbohydrates forces the body to use fat as fuel. To test the food, the rats were placed on either a standard diet or ketogenic diet immediately after cervical spinal cord contusion suffered. The ketogenic diet in rats recovered quickly: after 14 weeks, 54 % used their legs hurt 15 times more often than rats to a standard diet.
The research was supported by the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, the Foundation Craig H.
Nielsen, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
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