Posted on 05/16/2024 7:45:25 PM PDT by ConservativeMind
For the roughly 150,000 AIDS patients who come down with a life-threatening infection called fungal meningitis each year, there's only one treatment: a drug called fluconazole that works for less than half of patients.
Now, a study suggests there may be a way to improve the odds—simply by changing what patients eat.
In animal tests, the researchers found that taking fluconazole in combination with a low-carb, high-fat keto diet worked significantly better at killing the fungus than taking the medication alone.
For the new study, the researchers wondered if a keto diet—which deprives the body of glucose by cutting carbohydrate foods—might help starve the fungus and make it more vulnerable to treatment without hurting its host.
They did a series of experiments in mice.
The shift put the keto-diet mice into ketosis: a metabolic state where the body burns fats for energy instead of glucose.
After five days, the researchers measured how much of the fungus was still in the animals' bodies to see how well the treatments worked.
On its own, the keto diet did nothing to kill the fungus or stop infection. But the keto diet combined with fluconazole made for a potent mix.
Within a week of starting treatment, fluconazole alone reduced the levels of fungi in the mice by roughly 10- to 100-fold. But when taken in combination with a keto diet, the drug dropped the mice's fungal levels by as much as ten thousandfold.
What's more, a small dose of the drug taken on a keto diet was as effective as a fivefold higher dose taken on a standard diet.
The effects weren't restricted to Cryptococcus infections, either. The keto diet also made fluconazole more potent against another potentially life-threatening infection, caused when a yeast called Candida albicans enters the bloodstream.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
Keto boosted its effects by over 100 times.
If the AIDS Community realizes that EATING MEAT is the only option regarding this nasty fungal infection, we just may have hamburgers around a lot longer than the other Leftists had planned.
[low-carb, high-fat keto diet]
I have considered such
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