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Areas of interest

Nutritional Psychiatry: our aim is to find diet based interventions that can be used in combination with, or as side effect free alternatives to, psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants.

Our approach to achieving this is to target the dietary precursors of key neurotransmitters in the brain. For example, Vitamin-B6 is required to synthesize the main inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA, from the main inhibitory neurotransmitter, glutamate. Based on this, we have established that substantially increasing levels of dietary Vitamin-B6 increases GABA and reduces glutamate in the brain, so altering the neural excitation-inhibition balance in a way that is analogous to the action of anxiolytic drugs, but without side effects.

At the psychological level, participants in our studies report reduced symptoms of anxiety. We now aim to carry these results forward into clinical trials with adult and paediatric patients, specifically to ask whether combining high dose Vitamin-B6 with talking therapies such as CBT enhances their effectiveness.

Other current projects aim to identify more diet based interventions whose effects are additive with Vitamin-B6, and to look at potential benefits of high dose Vitamin-B6 for sensory reactivity problems in migraine, autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.