A vegan diet may help with diabetic neuropathy

By Janice Neumann

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A low-fat vegan diet may help ease the pain of peripheral diabetic neuropathy, suggests a small pilot study.

"This new study gives a ray of hope for a condition where there are no other good treatments," said Dr. Neal Barnard, the study's lead author and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit organization that promotes a vegan diet, preventive medicine, and alternatives to animal research.

As reported online May 26 in Nutrition and Diabetes, Dr. Barnard, who is also affiliated with the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and colleagues recruited 35 adults with type 2 diabetes and painful diabetic neuropathy. They randomized 17 participants to follow a low-fat vegan diet and take B12 supplements for 20 weeks, and attend weekly support classes. The other 18 were instructed to take B12 supplements but maintain their normal diet.

The vegan diet focused on vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. Overall, most participants on the vegan diet appeared to avoid animal products and about half stuck to low-fat diets throughout the study.

After 20 weeks, those on the vegan diet lost an average of about 15 pounds, compared to a little over one pound among those in the control group.

Several other measures of health improved among the participants on the vegan diet, compared to the control group.

Cholesterol profiles improved in the intervention group, and more intervention group participants (four versus zero) reduced lipid-lowering medications and fewer increased lipid-lowering medications (one versus three), the researchers reported.

Those on the vegan diet also reported a much greater drop in pain, compared to the control group, the researchers reported.

"Pain, as measured by the Short Form McGill Pain Questionnaire, declined by 9.1 points in the intervention group over 20 weeks and by 0.9 points in the control group (p=0.04). The largest decline was seen in the sensory subscore. Quality of life improved significantly within the intervention group but changes between group did not reach statistical significance," the researchers wrote.

Barnard and his team acknowledged larger trials would still be needed to show a vegan diet helped relieve pain related to peripheral diabetic neuropathy.

Dr. Stuart Weiss, an endocrinologist at New York University Langone Medical Center, said the study was "kind of cool," though the number of participants was small and the length of the study was short.

"We always talk about diabetes and diabetes control being about diet and exercise, but we end up prescribing a lot of medications and don't really focus that much on diet and exercise because that's not easy," said Dr. Weiss, who was not involved in the study.

He told Reuters Health that he typically advised patients to eat less processed and refined foods and not overeat.

"It might be that eating less of that in a plant-based diet might be helpful (in reducing inflammation), but again it was just 20 weeks and it takes years and years for neuropathy to develop," Weiss said. "We need to see long-term (results) and nobody's going to pay for that."

While Dr. Weiss said it was exciting that researchers were looking for an alternative to medication, he cautioned that not everyone would go for a vegan diet.

The authors reported no funding or disclosures.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1J4ZYiT

Nutr Diabetes 2015.

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