How do lettuce and oil protect the brain

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King's College London


A diet that combines unsaturated fats with nitrite-rich vegetables, such as olive oil and lettuce, can protect you from hypertension and vascular dementia. Learn which foods are helpful and why.

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A diet that combines unsaturated fats with nitrite-rich vegetables, such as olive oil and lettuce, can protect you from hypertension, suggests a dietary study led by King's College London. Hypertension is a major risk factor for vascular dementia.

The findings, published in the journal PNAS, help to explain why some previous studies have shown that a Mediterranean diet can reduce blood pressure.

The Mediterranean diet typically includes unsaturated fats found in:

• olive oil,
• nuts
• avocados,

along with vegetables that are rich in nitrites and nitrates like: 

• spinach,
• celery
• carrots.

When these two food groups are combined, the reaction of unsaturated fatty acids with nitrogen compounds in the vegetables results in the formation of nitro fatty acids.

The study, supported by the British Heart Foundation, used mice to investigate the process by which these nitro fatty acids lower blood pressure, looking at whether they inhibited an enzyme known as soluble Epoxide Hydrolase which regulates blood pressure.

Mice genetically engineered to be resistant to this inhibitory process were found to maintain their high blood pressure despite being fed the type of nitro fatty acids that normally form when a Mediterranean diet is consumed. However, nitro fatty acids were found to lower the blood pressure of normal mice following the same diets.

Thus, the study concludes that the protective effect of the Mediterranean diet, combining unsaturated fats and vegetables abundant in nitrite and nitrate, comes at least in part from the nitro fatty acids generated which inhibit soluble Epoxide Hydrolase to lower blood pressure.

Professor Philip Eaton, Professor of Cardiovascular Biochemistry at King's College London, said: 

"The findings of our study help to explain why previous research has shown that a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts can reduce the incidence of cardiovascular problems like stroke, heart failure and heart attacks."

Source:

• King's College London

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Journal Reference:

1. Rebecca L. Charles, Olena Rudyk, Oleksandra Prysyazhna, Alisa Kamynina, Jun Yang, Christophe Morisseau, Bruce D. Hammock, Bruce A. Freeman, and Philip Eaton. Protection from hypertension in mice by the Mediterranean diet is mediated by nitro fatty acid inhibition of soluble epoxide hydrolase. PNAS, May 2014 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1402965111

Giving birth to sons can reduce chances of getting Alzheimer's disease

Caregivers, and healthcare professionals, here is some great information

Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professinals,

Your residents will love the Amazon Kindle Fire

Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be

Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care  professionals to get an easyceu or two

Follow alzheimersideas on twitter

The Dementia Caregiver's Little Book of Hope [Kindle Edition

Study shows male DNA lingers in mothers' brains

ScienceNOW

Giving a whole new meaning to "pregnancy brain," a new study shows that male DNA, likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus, can persist in a woman's brain throughout her life.

Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease, hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say.

During mammalian pregnancy, the mother and fetus exchange DNA and cells. Previous work has shown that fetal cells can linger in the mother's blood and bone for decades, a condition researchers call fetal microchimerism.

Health benefits

The lingering of the fetal DNA, research suggests, may be a mixed blessing for a mom: The cells may benefit the mother's health by promoting tissue repair and improving the immune system, but may also cause adverse effects, such as autoimmune reactions.

One question is how leftover fetal cells affect the brain. Researchers have shown that fetal microchimerism occurs in mouse brains, but they had not shown this in humans.

So a team led by autoimmunity researcher and rheumatologist J. Lee Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash., took samples from autopsied brains of 59 women who died between the ages of 32 and 101.

By testing for a gene specific to the Y chromosome, they found evidence of male DNA in the brains of 63 percent of the women. (The researchers did not have the history of the women's pregnancies.)

The male DNA was scattered across multiple brain regions, the team reported online Wednesday in the scientific journal PLoS ONE.

Because some studies have suggested that the risk of Alzheimer's disease increases with an increasing number of pregnancies, the team also examined the brains for signs of the disease, allowing them to determine if Alzheimer's correlated with the observed microchimerism.

Of the 59 women, 33 had Alzheimer's, but contrary to the team's expectation, the women with disease had significantly less male DNA in their brains than did the 26 women who did not have the disease.

Whether that correlation means that fetal male DNA helps protect women against Alzheimer's is unclear.

"To me, this suggests that the presence of fetal cells in the female brain prevents disease," said cardiologist Hina Chaudhry of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Cells migrate

In a study published online in Circulation Research late last year, Chaudhry and colleagues found that fetal cells in mice migrated to the mother's heart, differentiated into functioning cardiac cells, and accelerated repair to damaged heart tissue.

So, Chaudhry says, a similar thing could be happening when fetal cells migrate to the brain. "I would bet these cells are getting into the maternal brain and are able to differentiate into neurons."

A 2010 study in Stem Cells and Development showed that fetal cells can migrate to the brain of a mother mouse and mature into neurons, Nelson says. But, she adds, it remains unclear if something similar is happening in humans. It's also difficult to reach any firm conclusions about a potential link between microchimerism and Alzheimer's disease.

Part of the problem is that her team had little information about the pregnancy histories of the women in their study.

"We have to say we really don't know," she said. "I hope that kind of work can be done in the future, but it's very difficult to do with human samples."