Intermittent fasting is a type of diet in which daily meals are reduced, making the body spend about 12 or 16 hours without eating food. A new study carried out by Imperial College London (United Kingdom) has revealed that this type of diet could help restore nerve damage without the need for surgery, which represents a great advance in medicine.
In the research, which has been recently published in the journal Nature, it was observed how the restriction of meals caused the intestinal bacteria to increase the production of 3-indolepropionic acid (IPA), a metabolite necessary to restore nerve fibers known as axons.
The study tests were carried out on mice in which the sciatic nerve was crushed, half of them were subjected to intermittent fasting – in which there were days that they ate everything they wanted and others in which they were completely restricted -, and the other half ate freely without limits. The time that this type of diet lasted was 10 or 30 days before the operation, and the recovery of the rodents was controlled from 24 to 72 hours after cutting the nerve.
A new potential therapy for nerve damage
“There is currently no treatment for people with nerve damage beyond surgical reconstruction, which is only effective in a small percentage of cases, which leads us to investigate whether lifestyle changes could aid recovery.” , has exposed Simone Di Giovanni, one of the authors of the study.
When mice with damaged sciatic nerves were given IPA, there was regeneration and greater recovery two to three weeks later
And it is that, their findings have shown that the length of the regenerated axons was up to 50% greater in the mice that were intermittently fasted and the levels of specific metabolites, including IPA, were also much higher. Furthermore, they found that the bacterium that produces IPA, Clostridium sporogenesis, is naturally present in the intestine and in human blood and in mice only in the intestines.
To check the results and find out if it was the IPA that caused the nerves to recover, the researchers treated the mice with antibiotics, in order to cleanse their intestines of any type of bacteria. They then received genetically modified sporogenesis strains of Clostridium that may or may not produce IPA.
“When these bacteria cannot produce IPA and it was almost absent in the serum, regeneration was affected. This suggests that the IPA generated by these bacteria has the ability to heal and regenerate damaged nerves”, explains Di Giovanni. When mice were given IPA orally after injuring their sciatic nerve, regeneration and greater recovery occurred within two to three weeks.
The researchers want to go further and will begin to analyze the role of therapy with bacterial metabolites. In addition, they want to know if extending the administration of IPA throughout the day, since it lasts four to six hours in the blood at high concentrations, could help increase its therapeutic effect.
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