Clinical trial proves that the ketogenic diet is effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease

The ketogenic diet proved to be effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease (PKD) in the first randomized controlled clinical trial of ketogenic metabolic therapy for Polycystic Kidney Disease.

The researchers’ study is published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.

This prevailing belief was what the Weimbs Lab and colleagues from various research institutions in Germany set out to challenge with their trial. Sixty-six PKD patients were recruited by the German research team headed by research physician Dr. Roman Müller of the University of Cologne and randomly split into three groups: a control group that received routine PKD counseling, another group that underwent a three-day water fast every month and a third group that observed a low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet. The patients were followed closely with blood draws and MRI scans.

At the end of the three-month trial period, the researchers found that while the control group experienced the expected growth in the size of their kidneys, the ketogenic diet patients’ kidneys stopped growing and appeared to show a tendency to shrink somewhat, though the researchers pointed out that the shrinkage over the 90-day trial period failed to meet statistical significance.

The most striking evidence came in the form of measurably improved kidney function in the ketogenic diet patients which was statistically significant.

“To everyone’s great surprise, kidney function actually improved with the ketogenic diet,” said Wiembs. It’s not something one would expect, he added, if PKD was truly something that could only get worse over time. “And that was a hard outcome of statistical significance.”

Reference: Clinical trial proves that the ketogenic diet is effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease; Cell Reports Medicine