Certain dietary fats linked to more severe, hard-to-treat asthma in children

Researchers have found that certain lipids (fats) in obesity-causing foods also cause asthma-like lung inflammation. The findings suggest that in addition to modifying dietary choices, certain existing drugs could be repurposed to help treat this type of asthma.

The study was prompted by researchers noticing an association between childhood obesity and neutrophilic asthma, a non-allergic type of asthma triggered by microbial and bacterial proteins. Neutrophilic asthma is more difficult to treat than allergic asthma.

To study this in more detail, researchers focused on lung macrophages, which are specialized white blood cells that coordinate immune function during inflammation. While metabolic stress can alter macrophage function, the effects of specific dietary components had been unclear. In this study, the researchers found that certain dietary fats, including those used in processed foods, shape macrophage activation in the lungs during inflammatory responses.

"Prior to this study, many suspected that childhood obesity was causing this form of asthma," said David A. Hill, MD, Ph.D.

"What we found in both preclinical work and studies in children was that diets containing certain saturated long chain fatty acids can cause neutrophilic asthma independent from obesity."

The researchers first explored a high-fat diet in a preclinical animal model, where they found that lung macrophages accumulated a saturated long chain fatty acid called stearic acid, which is often found in animal fat and processed foods. Notably, dietary stearic acid worsened airway inflammation without causing obesity. Conversely, oleic acid, a monounsaturated long chain fatty acid, suppressed inflammatory activity.

The researchers also found that blocking the inflammatory cytokine IL-1β or inhibiting the protein IRE1⍺—both of which are found in increased levels in neutrophilic asthma—protected against stearic acid-driven lung inflammation. The study confirmed some of these preclinical findings in a group of obese children with asthma.

I think the study is sketchy.

I looked for foods fed to rats and see that they isolated Stearic Acid (SA) and gave 100mM to the rats over a 24 hours period.

Sadly, sa is in everything, including supplements I buy, foods etc.

I found the mention of the ‘sa’ given to rats in PDF download under the heading ‘Supplemental materials’ which encompasses ‘Materials and Methods’.

Mice are given sa for 24 hrs, then investigative analysis (blot tests etc.) are subject to the same quantity of sa for 24 hrs.

I think this is an anti meat article - SA is more prevalent in animal fats. I just find the article odd.

stearic acid is also known as octadecanoic acid. It’s a soft waxy solid with the formula CH₃₁₆CO₂H. SA is a prevalent fatty acid in nature, found in many animal and vegetable fats, but is usually higher in animal fat than vegetable fat.
But maybe I’m just paranoid, because elsewhere on the ‘net I read that stearic acid in edible bugs makes them taste better! *shudder*
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10509705/

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.adp5653

Other causes, have posted on this before, and ivermectin, other antiparasite items such as black walnut hull tincture, and fenfenbanizole (sp) may help due to this cause . . .
- - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Symptoms of Asthma Linked in Study of Parasites

By Lawrence K. Altman
Feb. 15, 1970
Symptoms of Asthma Linked in Study of Parasites
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
February 15, 1970, Page 60Buy Reprints
New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.
SUBSCRIBE

About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
A Canadian physician has re ported findings that suggest wider correlation than was pre viously suspected between symptoms of bronchial asthma and the presence of intestinal parasites.

In a cautious editorial, ac companying the report. The New England Journal of Medi cine said that the findings were “so fresh and yet so outlandish as to cause consternation” about their publication, but that they were “too important not to be brought out into the daylight of public scrutiny.”

Such scrutiny means that doctors elsewhere must con firm or deny the results of Dr. David C. H. Tullis’s study. If such studies obtain similar re sults, then physicians may be able to relieve many patients’ asthma symptoms by control ling the parasitic infection.

Doctors have long been aware that certain parasites, either by an allergic reaction or by migrating through the lungs, may cause paroxysms of wheez ing, coughing and shortness of breath much like bronchial asthma.

When diagnosing asthma, they sometimes search for para sites in the stools of patients whose medical histories suggest an infection with these organ isms, which thrive in the human bowel. Usualy such patients have traveled in tropical areas where parasitic infections are considered more common than in North America.

Even in asthamatic patients who never have been to the tropics, Dr. Tullis said yester day, physicians should look harder for these particular para sites.

“I don’t believe it’s the pres ence of these worms in the intenstine, but that it is the migration of the larvae [young forms of the worm] through the body to the lung that is in directly responsible for the symptoms,” the Ontario physi cian said.

The three parasites were found in 198 of the 201 asthma cases he treated at the Niagara Peninsula Sanitorium in Saint Catharines from 1965 to 1968. None of these patients had traveled in tropical countries.

In striking contrast to the presence of parasites in all but three of his asthma patients was the absence of parasites in non‐asthma patients. In 20 con trol patients, those, that is, who were treated at the same hospital for conditions other than allergic asthma or para sitic disease, doctors detected none of the three parasites.

Editors’ Picks

Dr. Tullis said he began his study eight years ago. Not un til late 1964, he wrote, “was it realized that the parasites that could be consistently found in these patients were Ascaris lumbricoides (93 per cent), strongyloides stercoralis (6 per cent) and Necator americanus (1 per cent).” All three para sites are known to cause aller gic asthmatic symptoms.

Parasites are just one of the factors involved in asthma (the word derives from the Greek for “panting”). In his study, Dr. Tullis excluded the relative ly uncommon types of asthma caused by heart failure and lung cancer. He studied bronchial asthma, a common disease, in which any of several factors can play a role.

Among these factors in aller gic individuals are dusts, pol lens, viral or bacterial infec tions of the lung or bronchi (the small tubes branching from the windpipe) and sometimes foods and drugs, such as as pirin.

Dr. Tulis’s study included pa tients from 2 to 80 years old who had had their bronchial asthma symptoms for from two months to 60 years. More than half of these patients had symp toms severe enough to require treatment at one time or an other with steroids.

Treatment with the appropri ate drug for each type of para sitic infection gave encouraging results in many patients, Dr. Tullis said, but because reinfec tion with the same parasite is a frequent occurrence, many oth ers continued to have asthma symptoms.

Dr. Tullis had only 20 non asthma patients in his study because of difficulty finding “suitable control patients.” These control patients, like those with asthma, had to eat a diet free of fruit and vege tables for several days to make laboratory examination of their stools easier. Such examina tions, done under a microscope, can require several hours of trained technician’s time.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/02/15/archives/symptoms-of-asthma-linked-in-study-of-parasites.html

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.