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Unexpected Allergy RELIEF from a Common Plant Compound

AHA Publisher — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 07:00:38 +0000

Lori Alton via NaturalHealth365 – According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 19 million adults in the United States have been diagnosed with allergic rhinitis in the past year alone. Also known as hay fever and seasonal allergies, allergic rhinitis causes a host of troublesome symptoms that can include congestion, sneezing, coughing, headache and itching, and watery eyes. While Western medicine attempts to treat hay fever with antihistamines, these drugs can cause unwanted side effects – including drowsiness, dizziness, and rapid heart rate. A recent University of Michigan study on quercetin benefits shows that this flavonoid, which is found in fruits and vegetables, can safely support lung function. Other research has showcased its allergy-easing effects. Let’s look at some of the most compelling benefits of quercetin. Benefits of Quercetin Include Potent Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Effects The health-promoting benefits of flavonoids such as quercetin have long been known to scientists. Two decades ago, in groundbreaking research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers identified flavonoids as effective antioxidants that could protect against chronic illnesses. In animal, cell, and clinical studies, quercetin has been shown to decrease inflammation and scavenge harmful free radicals, thereby reducing disease-causing oxidative damage. In addition, one study showed that quercetin supplementation decreased markers of oxidative stress and inflammation in patients with a chronic lung disease known as pulmonary sarcoidosis. In a 2020 clinical trial published in BMJ Open Respiratory Research, scientists evaluated the effects of supplementary quercetin on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a blanket term for a group of diseases that cause breathing problems. Participants with COPD were given supplementary quercetin for a week – with researchers concluding that the flavonoid was effective in reducing oxidative stress and lung inflammation. One of the primary goals of the study was to evaluate the safety of quercetin – and there was great news in that department. The team reported that the treatment was well-tolerated, with participants reporting no serious adverse events. Of course, it’s not only individuals with COPD that can benefit from quercetin. This non-toxic natural compound is proving its merits as a natural intervention to ease allergy discomfort. Quercetin Supports Healthy Lung Function, Studies Suggest One of quercetin’s “superpowers” is its ability to help stabilize cells that release histamine in the body. In other words, quercetin can function as a natural antihistamine. According to family medicine physician Jaclyn Tolentino, D.O., quercetin may help to reduce allergy symptoms such as runny nose, watery eyes, and swelling of the face and lips – minus the drying or sedating effects associated with pharmaceutical antihistamines. In addition, quercetin-rich diets are associated with a lower incidence of asthma, which currently affects 8.4 percent of American adults. In a review involving over 10,000 participants published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the investigators found that the risk of asthma was reduced by an eye-opening 24 percent with a high-quercetin diet. (The scientists also found health-sustaining benefits for the flavonoids naringenin, hesperidin, and kaempferol. This trio of antioxidant compounds tends to be found alongside quercetin in fruits and vegetables, so eating these healthy foods is a win/win for your health.) Incidentally, in a separate study, 12 weeks of quercetin supplementation reduced the risk of upper respiratory infections in healthy adults. (Not only does quercetin reduce the risk of developing certain diseases, but it appears to help healthy people stay that way!) Quercetin Benefits Heart Health Population studies show that people who eat diets high in flavonoids – such as quercetin, resveratrol, and catechin – have healthier levels of cholesterol. And preliminary studies have suggested that quercetin may reduce blood pressure and blood sugar in obese and overweight participants. Quercetin has also been found to improve cardiovascular health by inhibiting platelet aggregation – the tendency of blood to form dangerous clots. So, it’s really not surprising that the AJCN study showing asthma reduction from quercetin also showed that high-quercetin diets decreased the risk of death from ischemic heart disease. Clearly, supporting heart health is among the many benefits of quercetin. Boost Quercetin Intake with Organic Fruits and Vegetables Good dietary sources of quercetin include black and green tea, berries, cherries, tomatoes, onions, leafy green vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, peppers, beans, and apples. (Pro tip: Red apples are a better source than green apples, so – when it comes to quercetin content – a Red Delicious decisively beats a Granny Smith. And, don’t even think of peeling that apple. Most of its quercetin is found in the skin). When it comes to quercetin content, organic produce is the way to go. A recent study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry showed that organic tomatoes contained a stunning 79 percent more than those that were conventionally grown. Quercetin is available in supplementary form, sometimes packaged with bromelain (an anti-inflammatory enzyme found in pineapples) and vitamin C to increase bioavailability. Natural healers typically recommend quercetin amounts of 500 mg to 1,000 mg a day – but check first with your integrative doctor before supplementing. As a growing body of research shows, quercetin is emerging as a potent natural antioxidant that can support respiratory function and help to combat allergies. It’s just one more evidence-based reason to eat your (preferably organic) fruits and veggies! Sources for this article include: WomensHealthMag.com CDC.gov CDC.gov NIH.gov Healthline.com NIH.gov To read the original article click here.

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Asthma May Reduce Risk of Brain Tumors — But How?

AHA Publisher — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 08:00:44 +0000

Washington University in St. Louis via Newswise – There’s not much good that can be said about asthma, a breathing disease in which the airways become narrowed and inflamed. But there’s this: People with asthma seem to be less likely to develop brain tumors than others. And now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis believe they have discovered why. It comes down to the behavior of T cells, a type of immune cell. When a person — or a mouse — develops asthma, their T cells become activated. In a new mouse study, researchers discovered that asthma causes the T cells to behave in a way that induces lung inflammation but prevents the growth of brain tumors. What’s bad news for the airways may be good news for the brain. The findings, available online in Nature Communications, suggest that reprogramming T cells in brain tumor patients to act more like T cells in asthma patients could be a new approach to treating brain tumors. “Of course, we’re not going to start inducing asthma in anyone; asthma can be a lethal disease,” said senior author David H. Gutmann, MD, PhD, the Donald O. Schnuck Family Professor of Neurology. “But what if we could trick the T cells into thinking they’re asthma T cells when they enter the brain, so they no longer support brain tumor formation and growth? These findings open the door to new kinds of therapies targeting T cells and their interactions with cells in the brain.” The idea that people with inflammatory diseases, such as asthma or eczema, are less prone to developing brain tumors was first proposed more than 15 years ago, based on epidemiologic observations. But there was no obvious reason why the two very different kinds of diseases would be linked, and some scientists questioned whether the association was real. Gutmann is an expert on neurofibromatosis (NF), a set of complex genetic disorders that cause tumors to grow on nerves in the brain and throughout the body. Children with NF type 1 (NF1) can develop a kind of brain tumor known as an optic pathway glioma. These tumors grow within the optic nerves, which carries messages between the eyes and the brain. Gutmann, director of the Washington University NF Center, noted an inverse association between asthma and brain tumors among his patients more than five years ago but didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t until more recent studies from his lab began to reveal the crucial role that immune cells play in the development of optic pathway gliomas that he began to wonder whether immune cells could account for the association between asthma and brain tumors. Jit Chatterjee, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher and the paper’s first author, took on the challenge of investigating the association. Working with co-author Michael J. Holtzman, MD, the Selma and Herman Seldin Professor of Medicine and director of the Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, Chatterjee studied mice genetically modified to carry a mutation in their NF1 genes and form optic pathway gliomas by 3 months of age. Chatterjee exposed groups of mice to irritants that induce asthma at age 4 weeks to 6 weeks, and treated a control group with saltwater for comparison. Then, he checked for optic pathway gliomas at 3 months and 6 months of age. The mice with asthma did not form these brain tumors. Further experiments revealed that inducing asthma in tumor-prone mice changes the behavior of their T cells. After the mice developed asthma, their T cells began secreting a protein called decorin that is well-known to asthma researchers. In the airways, decorin is a problem. It acts on the tissues that line the airways and exacerbates asthma symptoms. But in the brain, Chatterjee and Gutmann discovered, decorin is beneficial. There, the protein acts on immune cells known as microglia and blocks their activation by interfering with the NFkappaB activation pathway. Activated microglia promote the growth and development of brain tumors. Treatment with either decorin or caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE), a compound that inhibits the NFkappaB activation pathway, protected mice with NF1 mutations from developing optic pathway gliomas. The findings suggest that blocking microglial activation may be a potentially useful therapeutic approach for brain tumors. “The most exciting part of this is that it shows that there is a normal communication between T cells in the body and the cells in the brain that support optic pathway glioma formation and growth,” said Gutmann, who is also a professor of genetics, of neurosurgery and of pediatrics. “The next step for us is to see whether this is also true for other kinds of brain tumors. We’re also investigating the role of eczema and early-childhood infections, because they both involve T cells. As we understand this communication between T cells and the cells that promote brain tumors better, we’ll start finding more opportunities to develop clever therapeutics to intervene in the process.” To read the original article click here.

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One New Drug May Treat Both Covid-19 and Alzheimer’s

AHA Publisher — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 07:00:05 +0000

Abigail Klein Leichman via Israel21c – Israeli-born Harvard professor’s investigational therapy suppresses immune system’s overproduction of proteins that trigger inflammation. “By the age of 80, one in three people develops Alzheimer’s. I’m trying to move the curve to 85 or 90 or maybe beyond.” A novel Alzheimer’s disease treatment now in advanced Phase 3 clinical trials could also prove effective in treating lung inflammation caused by Covid-19. The investigational therapy, ALZT-OP1, suppresses the immune system’s production of cytokines — proteins that trigger inflammation in a natural response to infection. A “cytokine storm” caused by an overzealous immune response plays a role in neuroinflammatory diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and in infectious diseases such as Covid-19 and influenza. “When we have too much virus in our lungs, our immune system starts reacting by activating cytokines to bombard the virus,” explains Israeli-born Harvard Medical School associate professor and serial medical entrepreneur David Elmaleh, scientific founder and CEO of AZTherapies. “But the number of cytokinesis is so high it causes inflammation of the lung and that can be dangerous. Our drug would slow the cytokine release and allow other treatments to work,” he tells ISRAEL21c. AZTherapies was founded in 2011 with $2 million from some of Elmaleh’s previous Israeli investors. The startup has now raised over $100 million and is building collaborations with Israeli institutions to commercialize the treatment after its expected FDA approval next year. Learning from Mistakes Elmaleh began by examining why previous Alzheimer’s drug candidates failed. Most of them attempted to prevent or dissolve the amyloid-beta plaques long thought to be the primary cause of disease. He saw three main problems plaguing the failed trials: too wide an age range of patients; too narrow a focus on one mechanism of treatment; and toxicity from prolonged drug exposure. Elmaleh’s approach is limited to people in the first stages of the disease and utilizes four treatment mechanisms. ALZT-OP1 is a proprietary mixture of a bit of ibuprofen (to treat inflammation) and cromolyn, originally an asthma drug. “Cromolyn doesn’t work the way it was approved because in asthma treatment it goes only into the upper lung,” Elmaleh explains. “I reengineered it to go into the deeper lung.” AZTherapies has more than 100 patents and patent applications on the formulation and the delivery method to get the drug across the blood-brain barrier. “Although it uses two existing drugs, it’s like a new drug and needs its own approval,” says Elmaleh. Phase 3 Clinical Trials For its advanced randomized clinical trials, AZTherapies identified participants based on cognition, function tests and brain pathology assessed by Alzheimer’s biomarkers in spinal fluid. “We screened 1,753 people in North America and Europe, and from that we got 620 subjects with the biomarkers that indicate early Alzheimer’s,” Elmaleh says. Of those 620, 589 completed 24 weeks of treatment, 492 completed 48 weeks of treatment, and 380 completed the whole 72-week study cycle. “We wanted to see if we are really modifying the path of the disease. We will unblind the study at the end of this year and then we’ll know how successful we are,” says Elmaleh. “We already know that giving our drug for a year and half is safe. That’s a very important issue because in the brain you have to treat disease for several years, unlike cancer.” He stresses that ALZT-OP1 is not a cure. Its goal is to keep early-stage patients disease-free for a longer period by slowing cytokine release. “By the age of 80, one in three people develops Alzheimer’s. I’m trying to move the curve to 85 or 90 or maybe beyond,” says Elmaleh. Covid-19 Trials Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the world and Elmaleh believed ALZT-OP1 could help patients with associated breathing distress caused by a cytokine storm. AZTherapies prepared a clinical trial protocol for the FDA and has approached several European countries and Israeli hospitals about trying its drug candidate on Covid-19 patients. Elmaleh has an impressive track record: several previous startups (among them Molecular Insight and Puretech Health) led to treatments representing more than a billion dollars in shareholder value. One of his inventions is FDG, the radionuclide used in PET scans. He was named one of “Biotech’s Most Enterprising Entrepreneurs” in Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News in 2014. Elmaleh was raised in the 1960s in Musrara (Morasha), then a neglected neighborhood of North African immigrants on the then-dangerous seam between the east and west sides of Jerusalem. In 1971, the same year Elmaleh received his PhD in organic chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, many of his childhood peers established the Israeli Black Panthers, one of Israel’s first effective movements for social and economic justice. Elmaleh made a different kind of history by becoming the first Musrara resident to do post-doc studies at Harvard. He remained there, raising his family in Boston and finding success in academia and entrepreneurship. Thanks to Elmaleh’s affiliations with Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, AZTherapies has an all-star lineup of scientific and business advisers from these institutions. He tells ISRAEL21c that AZTherapies’ approach to neuroinflammation is also being studied by other pharma companies. “Others are now looking at the same things as us, but we are ahead of everyone else and we’ll be the first to market,” he predicts. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Israel21c click here.

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Mysterious Vaping Illness Characterized by Fat-Laden Cells in the Lung

The AHA! Team — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 07:00:00 +0000

University of Utah via EurekAlert (Salt Lake City) – Lung scans from patients with vaping illness look like a serious viral or bacterial pneumonia, but those tests come back negative. Instead, diagnosis has been based on exclusion of known causes of similar respiratory illnesses combined with knowing the patient has a history of vaping. Doctors have identified a previously unrecognized characteristic of the vaping-related respiratory illness that has been emerging in clusters across the U.S. in recent months. Within the lungs of these patients are large immune cells containing numerous oily droplets, called lipid-laden macrophages. (Lipid-laden macrophages found in patients with vaping-related respiratory illness. Oily lipids are stained in red. Photo via Andrew Hansen, MD, Jordan Valley Medical Center). The finding may allow doctors to definitively diagnose the nascent syndrome more quickly and provide the right treatment sooner. It could also provide clues into the causes of the new and mysterious condition. Investigators at University of Utah Health reported the findings in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sept. 6. “While it is too soon to be sure, these lipid-laden macrophages may turn out to be useful to confirm or rule out this disease,” said the study’s senior author Scott Aberegg, M.D., a critical care pulmonologist at U of U Health. “They may also be helpful in understanding what is causing this illness,” Aberegg added. Watch a video of physicians and patients talking about their experiences with the vaping illness here. Lung scans from patients with vaping illness look like a serious viral or bacterial pneumonia, but those tests come back negative. Instead, diagnosis has been based on exclusion of known causes of similar respiratory illnesses combined with knowing the patient has a history of vaping. U of U Health investigators identified the lipid-laden macrophages in six out of six cases seen at University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City by the time of submitting the results for publication. The cells were found in samples after performing a procedure called bronchoalveolar lavage where fluid is squirted into a small section of the lungs and then collected for examination. Macrophages are a type of cell from the immune system that gather at sites of infection and perform the role of cleaning up debris. Staining them with a dye called Oil-red-O highlighted the oily droplets littered throughout these cells. Distinctive cells “These cells are very distinctive, and we don’t often see them. That made everybody start to think carefully about why they were there. Are they scavenging debris in the lungs that was introduced through vaping?” Aberegg said. Doctors at the U had the test performed on the first vaping patient treated at U of U Health in July 2019, after the referring doctor had suggested the patient could have lipoid pneumonia. The condition is diagnosed by screening for lipid-laden macrophages. After finding the marker in this patient, doctors performed the same test in subsequent patients suspected to have the vaping illness, and all were positive. Since submitting their findings for publication, the number of vaping illness cases with lipid-laden macrophages has risen to ten of ten patients examined, with new cases arriving weekly. The question remains as to whether the vaping respiratory illness is a type of lipoid pneumonia. Despite similarities, there are also differences. Unlike the vaping illness, classic lipoid pneumonia is typically seen in older individuals, typically caused by accidentally breathing in oil-based laxatives. Classic lipoid pneumonia also presents differently on x-rays of the lungs. Additional testing will need to be done to determine whether the vaping illness can be categorized as a new kind of lipoid pneumonia. “We need to determine if these cells are specific for the illness or whether they are also seen in vaping patients who are not ill and don’t have symptoms. If they are only seen in patients who get sick, we can begin to make some connections between what we’re seeing in the lipid laden macrophages and whatever components of the vaping oils may be causing this syndrome” Aberegg said. To read the original article click here.

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