Restricted Ketogenic Diet Therapy for Primary Lung Cancer with Brain Metastasis

> You can also do diet stuff.

I don't know your health condition, but this is not "diet stuff". It's pretty specific. Look "ketogenic diet for epilepsy". If you break it, you have symptoms very quickly. It IS a medicine.

The grams of protein/fat/carbs were pretty extreme, it's not just "low carb" or "just keto" or "diet" or "eat healthy".

The difference is that the diet works on some occasions where nothing works, or on some occasions it works very good.

Things like DT2 (virtahealth.com), maybe soon for kidney disease (ex from today Feasibility and impact of ketogenic dietary interventions in polycystic kidney disease: KETO-ADPKD—a randomized controlled trial), many mental disorders (metabolicmind.org, virtahealth will try for depression too), etc.

I also have a chronic condition and am experienced with what you're talking about. Personally I favor the approved treatment option, while also maintaining a healthy diet and exercise. I know what you mean though, there is a group of people that will reach for the low probability "cure." I think it's a personality trait of people who think they're in on a secret that no one else knows. Some combination of ignorance and arrogance.

Keto operates in both worlds. There are real world, approved applications. Even with multiple sclerosis keto has been shown to help with fatigue and depression, but it's not yet an approved treatment. It probably will never be. On the other hand some people with MS tout keto as a cure, for which there is scant evidence.

Please tell me what "mildly unconfortable" solution is there for stage 4 cancer that *metastases* into brain? I only know of chemotherapy!

People try diets (I prefer extended water fasting), because it affects everything! If cancer had spread into entire body, it is the only option, where you may keep your hair, and some sort of normal life!!

It is also for free and does not bancrupt your family!

Edit: I read the extract from study, keto was used AFTER chemotherapy to speedup recovery. Still, post chemo is nothing "mildly unconfortable".

> Three months after the cessation of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, a ketogenic diet (KD) was initiated. This approach was an attempt to stabilize the disease progression after chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Yeah, don't just read the headline and think that keto is going to be enough to cure or even prevent cancer. This study is a single patient that went on a ketogenic diet AFTER chemo/radiation therapy and saw a .1 CM reduction. Nothing happened even after they stopped the keto diet.

Always take extraordinary claims about cancer treatments with an asteroid sized grain of salt.

No idea if we have the same health condition(s) but I know exactly the phenomenon you're talking about. It's interesting/funny how different communities display this at different levels, though: way too many people in the autoimmune arthritis groups try to brute force their way through with sketchy diets (spoiler alert, they don't prevent permanent skeletal damage the way medications do), but most (not all) people in the inflammatory bowel disease groups are like "for the love of god please give me every drug you've got." Doubly interesting that the conditions themselves are often comorbid and the medications that treat one frequently treat both.

For cancer specifically, I've heard some pretty wild anecdotes about the Steve Jobs-esque diet truthers... and none that ended well.

One guy told me that his dad had cancer, and the "shill doctors" were trying to push chemo, but his dad opted for some pressed juice(?) regimen instead, with apparent success.

So I'm like "that's great, man, glad your dad is doing better" and he told me no, his dad did pass away... from getting chemo. Or so he claims. But it sounds to me like he really did just die of cancer.

I used to work in radiation oncology and I was treated with chemotherapy for testicular cancer.

This study specifically states that the diet was used after the patient was treated with radiation and chemo. Anyone who has ever been anywhere near cancer treatment knows that there is a tolerability limit for practically all cancer treatments and that this is one of the most difficult decisions clinicians have to make every day, between a patient in obvious agony and another cycle of treatment increasing the chance of recovery from 20% to 23%. Of course, in the United States of Financiers, the insurer will also have something to say about it.

So having another arrow in the quiver is something everyone can be grateful for.

> do the actual treatment, don't mess around with diet

No, you should do both. Telling people not to improve their diets is just as irresponsible as telling people not to take an effective medication. Especially in cases where there aren't effective treatments available, like some autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders.

This comes with all the obvious disclaimers like do your own research, make sure there is at least some evidence for the diet's overall healthiness and interactions so that it can't make things worse.

Personally, I effectively cured a 2-year stint with long covid through diet (essentially a low sugar paleo diet). Within a few months I was able to exercise again without a fight or flight reaction after years of no improvement. Doctors (including one who was also battling long covid) told me there was nothing they could do to help, but they hoped that some of the experimental treatments like stellate ganglion block might eventually bear fruit. I could have waited around with a much lower quality of life, but instead I started the very difficult diet, and it paid off. There's plenty of snake oil out there, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The world isn't black and white.

> very effective treatment which is mildly uncomfortable and time-consuming.

I'm not certain, but it seems like you are implying that diet is the easier choice. This is almost never the case, broadly speaking. Perhaps it's different in your specific community. The difficulty of sticking to a diet and knowing what foods should actually be included and excluded from a diet is probably the most significant hurdle to treating conditions that could benefit from diet (especially early onset conditions related to overall health). This is mostly a consequence of what's available and affordable in America, but is nonetheless a significant setback for recommending diets.

But where a good diets truly shine is in prevention. Just due to how unhealthy the modern American diet is, it's pretty easy to find benefit, so that should be a starting point alongside exercise when you don't have a cure-in-a-bottle handy.

First principles thinking says, if you remove the fuel and this stops replication while still allowing a host to live, that sounds like it should win outright.

We only carry 3.3-7grams of glucose in the blood stream at one time. This is cycled quite frequently, but in the limit, that's all it takes to sustain and let cancer thrive.

Jobs unfortunately screwed up the direction and ate plenty of sugars with his only fruit diet. My grandmother made the same mistake with breast cancer. Juices are basically cancer-gatorade.

I mean depending on which side of the brain the tumour is, it could be relevant. Don't quote me on this (I'm not a doctor) but the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body (including left hand) and the left controls the right.

Handedness is important in neuroscience as there are functional asymmetries for things such as language. Pretty much all right-handed brains have language lateralized to the left side, whereas around 70% of left-handers also have language lateralized to the left side. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4219560/ So if a person is left-handed it's unknown if the lateralization of various functions in their brain is the same as a right-hander or if things are mapped in strange places. Left-handers also have higher rates of schizophrenia and other disorders.

I say this as a left-hander who is doing his PhD in neuroscience, haha.

You experience ketosis by lowering carb intake. You may get shot in the mouth, stop eating, and get into ketosis but it doesn't mean ketosis results in gunshots to the mouth.

> Where is the line drawn between "ketosis treats cancer" and "ketosis is not having a noticable effect on late stage cancer"?

Different types of cancers, different stages of the cancer, different types of ketosis, different people.

This study should not be used to make ANY medical decisions and is only useful in proposing additional studies. I would recommend against sharing it with anyone who is not trained to read and understand these results. Often laypersons will take these studies and make absurd claims based off of them that kill people.

Keep in mind that this is a study of a single person and the tumor reduction was insignificant compared to the 4CM reduction from radio/chemo therapies. There is no way to know if Keto even did anything without a larger cohort. For all we know, it made the cancer worse than it would have been.

At 80 I would be more worried about the tumors than elevated cholesterol / fats

I was doing the keto diet several years ago. I went from 240lbs to 175. I had to stop though because my bad cholesterol went through the roof. Came to find that I am APOE4/4, basically I have a genetic mutation that among other things means my body has trouble dealing with saturated fats.

I stopped doing keto and ended up getting back up to 220lbs, but my blood levels went back to normal.

I really want to do keto again because it's the only thing that's ever worked for me and I keep hearing about studies like this, but I also don't want to mess up my levels again.

If your body cannot find blood glucose for metabolism then it will respond by efficiently digesting dietary fats and maintaining high lipid levels in the blood.

> The KD was terminated 10 years after diet initiation (2018) as the patient developed dyslipidemia (cholesterol >280 mg/dL, triglycerides >300 mg/dL).

It looks like his LDL was "only" 140, but yeah trigs at 300 are no bueno.

A case report is exactly that, a case.

Case report studies kinda by definition are on one patient.

Some do. A few love ketones.