Baszucki Group today announced the launch of two new initiatives across multiple sites exploring the effectiveness of ketogenic therapy for children and adolescents with bipolar disorder. The participating groups include a family resource center and four academic research institutions offering specialty programs devoted to treating serious mental illness in children and adolescents. These projects aim to develop ketogenic therapy programs and establish pilot data to fuel future randomized control trials and support programs in a youth population.

“For the first time in years, I felt like my brain was finally running on the right fuel,” said one of the participants in a new pilot study on a ketogenic diet in bipolar disorder. Published today in BJPsych Open, the study is the first to use neuroimaging to demonstrate that a ketogenic diet may improve brain metabolism in individuals with a bipolar disorder diagnosis.