A unifying mechanism of ketogenic diet action: The multiple roles of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.

The ability of a ketogenic diet to treat seizures and render a neuronal network more resistant to strong electrical activity has been observed for a century in clinics and for decades in research laboratories. Alongside ongoing efforts to understand how this therapy works to stop seizures, metabolic health is increasingly appreciated as critical buffer to resisting and recovering from acute and chronic disease. Accordingly, links between metabolism and health, and the broader emerging impact of the ketogenic diet in improving diverse metabolic, immunological and neurological conditions, have served to intensify the search for its key and/or common mechanisms. Here we review diverse evidence for increased levels of NAD, and thus an altered ratio of NAD/NADH, during metabolic therapy with a ketogenic diet. We propose this as a potential unifying mechanism, and highlight some of the evidence linking altered NAD/NADH with reduced seizures and with a range of short and long-term changes associated with the beneficial effects of a ketogenic diet. An increase in NAD/NADH is consistent with multiple lines of evidence and hypotheses, and therefore we suggest that increased NAD may be a common mechanism underlying beneficial effects of ketogenic diet therapy.