An antioxidant found in foods like kiwi fruit, soy and celery could protect against liver disease, new research has found.
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is the most common liver disease in the world, affecting about 33 per cent of the UK’s population.
The disease also heightens the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer.
The antioxidant, named Pyrroloquinoline quinone, or PQQ, is also found in human breast milk and a new study has found it can protect children of obese mothers from developing the obesity-induced liver disease.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus fed the antioxidant to obese mice during pregnancy and found it protected their offspring from developing early symptoms of liver fat, which leads to fatty liver.
Scientists found that mice fed a high fat, Western-style diet give birth to offspring with a higher chance of getting the disease.
The study’s lead author, Dr Karen Jonscher, associate professor of anaesthesiology and a physicist at the university, said: “When given to obese mouse mothers during pregnancy and lactation, we found it protected their offspring from developing symptoms of liver fat and damage that leads to fatty liver in early adulthood.
“We know that infants born to mothers with obesity have a greater chance of developing fatty liver over their lifetime, and in fact one-third of obese children under 18 may have undiagnosed fatty liver disease that, when discovered, is more likely to be advanced at the time of diagnosis.
“The goal of our study, which we carried out using a mouse model of obese pregnancy, was to determine whether a novel antioxidant given to mothers during pregnancy and breastfeeding could prevent the development of NAFLD in the offspring.”
Dr Jonscher and her colleagues fed adult mice healthy diets or Western-style diets heavy on fat, sugar and cholesterol. They gave a subset of both groups PQQ in their drinking water.
Their offspring were kept on the diets for 20 weeks and those fed a Western diet gained more weight than those on a healthy diet.
While the antioxidant did not change the weight gain, it did reduce the fat found in their livers, even before the mice were born.
The antioxidant also reduced inflammation in the livers of mice fed the Western diet.
It continued to protected adult mice from fatty liver, even when it was stopped after three weeks when the mice quit breastfeeding.
Dr Jonscher said the antioxidant could possibly be used as a prenatal or lactation supplement to protect children of obese mothers from developing liver and cardiovascular disease in adulthood.
She added: “Perhaps supplementing the diet of obese pregnant mothers with PQQ, which has proven safe in several human studies, will be a therapeutic target worthy of more study in the battle to reduce the risk of fatty liver in babies.”
The research was published in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
0 comments: