lupus Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Eating an Anti-Inflammatory Diet for Lupus

The AHA! Team — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 06:12:20 +0000

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM via Nutrition Facts – Green smoothies are put to the test for the autoimmune disease lupus. There are dozens and dozens of journals I try to stay on top of every month, and one I always anticipate is The International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, a peer-reviewed medical “journal created to document the science of nutrition and lifestyle to prevent, suspend and reverse disease,” with an editor-in-chief no less prestigious than Dr. Kim Williams, past president of the American College of Cardiology. I was honored to join its editorial advisory board, along with so many of my heroes. The best part? It’s free. Go to IJDRP.org and put in your email to subscribe at no cost, and you’ll be alerted when new issues are out, which you can download in full in PDF form. (Did I mention it’s free?) When it comes to chronic lifestyle diseases, wrote Dr. Williams, “Instead of preventing chronic lifestyle diseases, we [doctors] manage. Never cure, just mitigate. Why? Because of ﬁnance, culture, habit, and tradition.” There are many of us, though, who “envision a world where trillions of dollars are not spent on medical care that should never have been necessary, but rather on infrastructure, environment, education, and advancing science. For this reason, comes The International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention (IJDRP).” After all, wrote the journal’s co-founder, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” To give you a taste of the journal: How about pitting plants against one of the most inflammatory diseases out there—lupus, an autoimmune disease in which your body can start attacking your DNA? Kidney inflammation is a common consequence, and even with our armamentarium of immunosuppressant drugs and steroids, lupus-induced kidney inflammation can lead to end-stage renal disease, which means dialysis, and even death. That is, unless you pack your diet with some of the most anti-inflammatory foods out there and your kidney function improves so much you no longer need dialysis or a kidney transplant. Another similar case was presented with a resolution in symptoms and normal kidney function, unless the patient deviated from the diet and his symptoms then reappeared. As I discuss in my video Anti-Inflammatory Diet for Lupus, even just cutting out animal products can make a difference. Researchers randomized people to remove meat, eggs, and dairy from their diets without significantly increasing fruit and vegetable intake and found that doing just that can lower C-reactive protein levels by nearly a third within eight weeks, as you can see below and at 2:21 in my video. (Our C-reactive protein level is a sensitive indicator of whole-body inflammation.) But with lupus, the researchers didn’t mess around. Each day, the study subjects were to eat a pound of leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables like kale, fruits like berries, and lots of chia or flax, and drink a gallon of water. We’re talking about a green smoothie diet to extinguish lupus flares. (Note, though, that if your kidneys are already compromised, this should be done under physician supervision so they can monitor your electrolytes like potassium and make sure you don’t get overloaded with fluid.) Bottom line? With such remarkable improvements due to dietary changes alone, the hope is that researchers will take up the mantle and formally put it to the test. Reversals of autoimmune inflammatory skin disease can be particularly striking visually. A woman with a 35-year history of psoriasis that had been unsuccessfully managed for 19 years with drugs suffered from other autoimmune conditions, including Sjogren’s syndrome. She was put on an extraordinarily healthy diet packed with greens and other vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, avocados, and some whole grains, and boom! Within one year, she went from 40 percent of her entire body surface area inflamed and affected down to 0 percent, completely clear, and, as a bonus, her Sjogren’s symptoms resolved, too, while helping to normalize her weight and cholesterol. You can see before and after photos below and at 3:39 in my video. I think I only have one other video on lupus: Fighting Lupus with Turmeric: Good as Gold. It’s not for lack of trying, though. There just hasn’t been much research out there. I talk about another autoimmune disease, type 1 diabetes, in Type 1 Diabetes Treatment: A Plant-Based Diet. To read and subscribe—for free—to The International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, visit www.IJDRP.org. Key Takeaways The International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention (IJDRP), a peer-reviewed medical journal, focuses on documenting nutrition and lifestyle science to prevent, suspend, and reverse chronic diseases, and its editor-in-chief is Dr. Kim Williams. Research highlights the potential of anti-inflammatory diets, rich in plant-based foods, to significantly improve kidney function in lupus patients, potentially avoiding dialysis and transplants. Cutting out animal products reduces inflammation markers like C-reactive protein, offering substantial health benefits in managing autoimmune conditions such as lupus. A comprehensive plant-based diet effectively cleared severe psoriasis and associated autoimmune symptoms in a patient, showcasing dramatic visual and health improvements within a year. To read the original article click here.

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Israeli Researcher Develops Molecule to Block Lupus

AHA Publisher — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 08:00:24 +0000

Naama Barak via Israel21c – Israeli, American scientists discover way to prevent the leakage of DNA and proteins associated with autoimmune diseases. Israeli researchers and stateside colleagues have recently discovered a way to prevent the release of DNA associated with the development of lupus, an autoimmune disease affecting 5 million people around the world. The researchers identified the pathway through which“pro-cell death proteins” and mitochondrial DNA exit cells – a process that triggers autoimmune diseases –and created a molecule to block this route. The molecule, called VBIT-4, was created by Prof. Varda Shoshan-Barmatz of Ben-Gurion University and the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev. She tested the discovery on mouse models of lupus with Dr. Jay Chung from the US National Institutes of Health. Their research was recently published in the Science journal. The pathway that the researchers identified is called mitochondrial protein voltage-dependent anion channel (VDAC1). In some autoimmune diseases VDAC1 is over-expressed, meaning that a large pore composed of several VDAC1 units is formed, allowing the release of pro-cell death factors and mitochondrial DNA. The researchers used VBIT-4 to prevent the formation of this large pore and the subsequent release of pro-cell death factors associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as the mitochondrial DNA associated with lupus. “Our breakthrough is identifying a new pathway for the exit of mitochondrial DNA that we can either trigger under controlled conditions or inhibit using our novel molecule that we specifically developed to prevent the formation of this pathway,” said Shoshan-Barmatz. “Since the results thus far with lupus have been so promising, we believe that the molecule will be beneficial with regard to other diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis – as our preliminary results already support,” she added. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Israel21c click here.

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Developing Therapeutic Strategies for Pregnant Women with Lupus

AHA Publisher — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 05:00:46 +0000

Virginia Tech via EurekAlert – “For patients with autoimmune lupus, diet and probiotics are the two relatively easy and acceptable approaches that can potentially improve disease management through modulating the gut microbiota…” Systemic lupus erythematosus, a chronic autoimmune disease commonly referred to as lupus or SLE, has been compared to volatile, unprovoked brawls within the body. The disease, which has no cure, operates much like an allergic reaction gone awry: When activated, the immune system also attacks the body’s healthy cells, tissues, and organs, causing inflammation and producing a host of symptoms that, though unique to each person, are universally called flares. A highly gender-biased disease, lupus afflicts females some nine times more than males. Because of the disease’s unpredictable turns and debilitating flares – the risks of which are elevated in postpartum women – females with the disease are often advised to avoid pregnancy altogether. To understand this higher risk of severe flares and ultimately help women with lupus experience healthy pregnancies and successful outcomes, a team of researchers in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology (DBSP) at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine explored the possible role of gut microbiota in the link between pregnancy and the exacerbation of lupus. The team’s findings, “Pregnancy and lactation interfere with the response of autoimmunity to modulation of gut microbiota,” were recently published in the online journal Microbiome. “There are 38 trillion bacteria living in the gut of an average person, collectively called the gut microbiota,” said Xin M. Luo, associate professor of immunology in DBSP and lead author of the paper with Qinghui Mu, formerly a DBSP postdoctoral fellow and now a postdoctoral research fellow in immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University School of Medicine. “Disturbance of the gut microbiota exists in the pathogenesis of many autoimmune diseases, including lupus.” Identifying gut microbiota’s role in heightened flares among pregnant women with lupus, however, was uncharted territory. Working with the lead authors as members of the DBSP research team were Ph.D. student Xavier Cabana-Puig; visiting scholar Jiangdi Mao; Ph.D. student Leila Abdelhamid; clinical associate professor of anatomic pathology Thomas E. Cecere; Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health Graduate Program Ph.D. student Brianna Swartwout; Professor Haifeng Wang of the College of Animal Science at Zhejiang University, China; and Professor Christopher M. Reilly, discipline chair for cellular biology and physiology at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. The research team examined the changes of gut microbiota structure with or without the experience of pregnancy, as well as the differential responses of the immune system to the same microbiota-modulating strategies in unaffected versus postpartum lupus-prone mice. The results indicate that the strategies benefitting the unaffected mice actually worsened lupus disease in postpartum mice. “Our findings suggest that the gut microbiota may regulate lupus flares in pregnant women,” Luo said of the team’s research. “Our work helps to uncover the mechanisms underlying pregnancy-induced disease flares and offers the possibility of developing new therapeutic strategies for pregnant women with lupus.” The ultimate goal of her team’s research, Luo explains, is to identify beneficial and pathogenic gut bacterial species and to develop therapeutic strategies that modulate the gut microbiota community toward a beneficial effect. “For patients with autoimmune lupus, diet and probiotics are the two relatively easy and acceptable approaches that can potentially improve disease management through modulating the gut microbiota,” Luo said. “But it is challenging to achieve this goal due to the complexity of the disease pathologies, the complexity of gut microbiota, and the differences of gut microbiota communities among individuals.” For its next steps, the research team plans to investigate the interaction between sex hormones and gut microbiota in regulating lupus pathogenesis. “Women experience hormonal changes, which include sex hormones, during pregnancy and postpartum,” said Luo. “In addition, lupus has a strong female bias, suggesting a role for sex hormones in the disease.” According to Luo, future investigations will focus on lupus nephritis, the leading cause of mortality in lupus patients, to further delineate the role of gut microbiota in the link between pregnancy and exacerbated lupus. To read the original article click here.

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