A high-fat food regimen could help the body do away with deadly parasitic worms that reside in the big intestine, in line with a latest study.
Lancaster University scientists examined how a high-fat food regimen could induce resistance against helminth infection in a study published within the journal Mucosal Immunology.
In response to the team, gastrointestinal worm infections cause morbidity and socio-economic loss in deprived communities. They sought to find out whether the food regimen could provide immune-regulated protection against the infection.
The researchers focused on the parasite Trichuris trichiura, a soil-transmitted helminth affecting tens of millions of individuals worldwide. Though its infection isn’t fatal, the whipworm is understood to cause severe symptoms, including abdominal pain, diarrhea, intestinal bleeding, anemia and dietary deficiencies.
In developing countries with poor sanitation, whipworm infection is common. At the identical time, obesity has turn into a growing concern in these nations resulting from the supply of highly processed foods with high levels of sugar and fat. The team decided to work on determining the connection between the 2 in mice experiments.
For the mice models, the team had to make use of Trichuris muris, a parasite similar in morphology and genome to T. trichiura. It also stays in the identical intestinal area of interest as its human parasite counterpart. A few of the mice were subjected to a high-fat food regimen to ascertain its effect on the parasitic infection.
After analyzing data, the researchers reported the high-fat diet-induced expulsion of T. muris in mice. In response to them, the high-fat food regimen allowed the immune system to eliminate the parasite.
“We were quite surprised by what we found during this study. High-fat diets are mostly related to increased pathology during disease. Nevertheless, within the case of whipworm infection this high fat food regimen licenses the T-helper cells to make the right immune response to expel the worm,” study co-lead Dr. John Worthington from the Department of Biomedical and Life Science at Lancaster University said in a press release.
“It was really fascinating that simply altering the food regimen completely switched the immune response within the gut from one which fails to expel the parasite, to 1 that brings about all the right mechanisms to eliminate it,” co-lead Prof. David Thornton from the University of Manchester added.
Except for the proven fact that the experiment was conducted in mice, the researchers also warned that their findings don’t necessarily suggest that following a high-fat food regimen could be useful to the health, parasite-wise. Worthington identified that weight reduction was also found to expel a unique gut parasite.
“So these results could also be context specific, but what is absolutely exciting is the demonstration of how food regimen can profoundly alter the capability to generate protective immunity, and this will likely give us latest clues for treatments for the tens of millions who are suffering from intestinal parasitic infections worldwide,” he explained.
In response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 604-795 million people on the earth are infected with whipworms. Infection is more common in areas with tropical weather and poor access to good hygiene and proper sanitation. Cases have been reported within the southern United States.