Keto diets may help preserve brain health later in life, but why is that? New research in mice sheds fresh light on this matter. Image credit: d3sign/Getty Images. Research has already shown that ketogenic diets may improve brain performance in older male mice.
Now, the authors of a new study in mice have identified a particular mechanism that might underpin this phenomenon.
The research raises questions about the role of diet in aging and brain health.
Researchers have discovered a potential mechanism underpinning the improvements seen in aging male mice on ketogenic diets — “keto diets,” for short.
They have proposed that cycling male mice between a control diet and a ketogenic diet results in an improvement in the signalling that occurs between synapses in the brain.
Previously, John Newman, MD, PhD , one of the authors of the paper, had published a proof-of-concept study showing that giving male mice a cyclic ketogenic diet reduced their midlife risk of death and prevented memory decline associated with normal aging.
“After reading two seminal papers published in 2017 that showed its beneficial roles in the overall health of aged mice, including brain performance, we decided to study the effect of the ketogenic diet,” Christian Gonza lez-Billault , professor at the Universidad de Chile, director of the Geroscience Center for Brain Health and Metabolism (GERO), and Adjunct Professor at The Buck Institute for Research on Aging, lead author of the new study on keto diets and aging, told Medical News Today .
“In these two [previous] works, the authors showed improvement in specific behavioral tasks routinely used in animal experimentation to evaluate memory and learning,” he continued.
“Such an improvement convinced us to go deeper into the molecular mechanisms that explain that positive response on one side, but also prompted us to include several other assessments at different levels, ranging from the whole organism level to the molecular functions, to understand why the diet was beneficial in aged animals,” added Gonza lez-Billault, who collaborated with Newman on the recent study. The latest results from the team appear in Cell Reports Medicine .To investigate […]
How keto diets may help boost memory, brain health later in life
