Modeling the effects of ketogenic therapy on survival in patients with high grade glioma using Bayesian evidence synthesis

Background: Ketogenic therapy in the form of ketogenic diets or calorie restriction has been proposed as a metabolic treatment of high grade glioma (HGG) brain tumors based on mechanistic reasoning obtained mainly from animal experiments. Given the paucity of clinical studies of this relatively new approach, our goal is to extrapolate evidence from the greater number of animal studies and synthesize it with the available human data in order to estimate the expected effects of ketogenic therapy on survival in HGG patients. Methods and Findings: A Bayesian hierarchical model was developed. Data from three human co…