Kristi Anne Kohlmeier
Can a dietary strategy reverse neuronal and glial alcohol related dysfunction?
Worldwide, 5.3% of all deaths result from harmful use of alcohol. Despite this, only a small fraction of patients receive treatment for alcohol dependence, and when they do, 60-80% of patients relapse. Therefore, there is a significant need for new treatment options to save lives and reduce the burden on mental health care systems.
One new potential treatment option is the ketogenic diet. While initial data are encouraging that this diet can reduce alcohol dependence, the mechanism of action underlying the beneficial effects of the ketogenic diet in management of alcohol use disorder remains elusive.
In this grant funded by the Lundbeck Foundation Experiment, 3 collaboratory laboratories propose to determine the mechanism(s) underlying therapuetic effects of the ketogenic diet in an animal model of alcohol use disorder by evaluating the novel hypothesis that it is the medium chain triglycerides (MCTs) that exert beneficial actions through changes in excitatory neuronal signaling. If correct, we will provide a rationale for MCT use. As MCTs are already available as dietary supplements, our work should support their incorporation into alcohol use disorder management strategies resulting in a much more rapid 'from benchside to patient' process than that offered by the typical drug development pipeline.
