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Nutritional ketosis, achieved by following a high fat, low carbohydrate diet, has therapeutic effects for a broad range of neurological disorders, particularly seizures. To aid with his research in this area, Dr. D'Agostino is developing ketone supplements – ketone esters and ketone mineral salts. In this clip, Dr. Dominic D'Agostino describes his research into the role of ketosis and ketone supplements in stabilizing brain energy metabolism.
Rhonda: So tell us a little bit about your...some of your more recent interests and research where you're, sort of, been, what have you been looking at.
Dom: Okay, so more recently, I'd say within the last three to five years, and it took a while to develop them, but as you know we're working on ketone supplementation. And the idea is to, kind of, mimic the therapeutic effects and performance-enhancing effects of the ketogenic diet. So nutritional ketosis achieved through a dietary means with a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet has therapeutic effects for a broad range of neurological disorders, in particular, seizures. And you can make the argument that pretty much every neurological disorder is some way linked to a metabolic dysregulation. And we're interested in understanding how nutritional ketosis may help to preserve and, sort of, stabilize brain energy metabolism to metabolically manage these seizure disorders.
So in the process of understanding and studying the ketogenic diet, we are developing a broad range of ketone supplements which can include ketone esters and ketone mineral salts, which where we combine a ketone body, beta-hydroxybutyrate, to an essential electrolyte and create a wide variety of salts. And we're working...a lot of the work now is focused on formulating these to make them tolerable, to make them palatable, and to understand their therapeutic potency for different types of disorders.
A chemical produced in the liver via the breakdown of fatty acids. Beta-hydroxybutyrate is a type of ketone body. It can be used to produce energy inside the mitochondria and acts as a signaling molecule that alters gene expression by inhibiting a class of enzymes known as histone deacetylases.
A diet that causes the body to oxidize fat to produce ketones for energy. A ketogenic diet is low in carbohydrates and high in proteins and fats. For many years, the ketogenic diet has been used in the clinical setting to reduce seizures in children. It is currently being investigated for the treatment of traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer's disease, weight loss, and cancer.
Molecules (often simply called “ketones”) produced by the liver during the breakdown of fatty acids. Ketone production occurs during periods of low food intake (fasting), carbohydrate restrictive diets, starvation, or prolonged intense exercise. There are three types of ketone bodies: acetoacetate, beta-hydroxybutyrate, and acetone. Ketone bodies are readily used as energy by a diverse array of cell types, including neurons.
The thousands of biochemical processes that run all of the various cellular processes that produce energy. Since energy generation is so fundamental to all other processes, in some cases the word metabolism may refer more broadly to the sum of all chemical reactions in the cell.
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