Statins, used to lower the risk of heart attack or stroke, may also provide protection against a host of infectious diseases, including typhoid fever, chlamydia and malaria, a study claims.<\/p>\n
Scientists from Duke University in the US have discovered that a gene variant which affects cholesterol levels could increase the risk of contracting typhoid fever.<\/p>\n
They also showed that a common cholesterol-lowering drug (ezetimibe or Zetia) could protect zebrafish against Salmonella Typhi, the culprit behind the nasty infection.<\/p>\n
The findings, which appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, give insight into the mechanisms that govern human susceptibility to infectious disease.<\/p>\n
They also point to possible avenues to protect those who are most vulnerable to pathogens – like the Salmonella bacteria – that hijack cholesterol to infect host cells.<\/p>\n
“We need to try this approach in different model organisms, such as mice, and likely with different pathogens, before we can consider taking this into the clinic,” said Dennis C Ko, assistant professor at Duke University School of Medicine.<\/p>\n
“What is so exciting is that our study provides a blueprint for combining different techniques for understanding why some people are more susceptible to disease than others, and what can be done about it,” Ko said.<\/p>\n
Ko and his team used hundreds of cell lines from healthy human volunteers and exposed them to the exact dose of Salmonella Typhi, which had been tagged with a green fluorescent marker.<\/p>\n
They then looked for genetic differences that distinguished cells that had higher rates of bacterial invasion from those that did not.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that a single nucleotide of DNA in a gene called VAC14 was associated with the level of bacterial invasion in cells.<\/p>\n
When they knocked out the gene, the cells were invaded more readily and more of the cells glowed brightly with green bacteria.<\/p>\n
They also unexpectedly found that those more susceptible cells had higher levels of cholesterol, an essential component of cell membranes that Salmonella binds to invade host cells.<\/p>\n
Researchers tested DNA from subjects in a group of 1,000 Vietnamese people, half of whom had typhoid fever and half did not.<\/p>\n
They found that the VAC14 gene variant was associated with a moderately elevated risk of typhoid fever.<\/p>\n
“Discovering the mechanism was important because plenty of people are on cholesterol-lowering drugs, especially statins for high cholesterol,” said Ko.<\/p>\n
“We wondered if similar drugs could be given to reduce the risk of Salmonella infection,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Statins, used to lower the risk of heart attack or stroke, may also provide protection against a host of infectious diseases, including typhoid fever, chlamydia and malaria, a study claims. Scientists from Duke University in the US have discovered that a gene variant which affects cholesterol levels could increase the risk of contracting typhoid fever. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2796,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2797,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions\/2797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}