Soybeans and MS

[swiftpoet]

A diet rich in isoflavones (compounds found in soybeans) could reduce the severity of multiple sclerosis (MS), by boosting the abundance of specific isoflavone-metabolising gut microbes, a study reveals1....

Mice fed an isoflavone-free diet showed severe disease and mice on the standard diet showed intermediate disease, while mice on the isoflavone-rich diet exhibited greatly diminished disease severity....

The researchers found that consumption of isoflavones increased the diversity of specific species of gut bacteria. These bacteria broke down isoflavones into equol that checked the infiltration of specific immune cells into the CNS of EAE-afflicted mice. This, in turn, lowered inflammation and improved their health....

ARTICLE:

nature india research highlights article

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

06 August 2021

Soybeans may help alleviate multiple sclerosis symptoms

A diet rich in isoflavones could boosting the abundance of specific gut microbes, study shows.

[AquaZumbaFan]

Very interesting article! I am a big fan of edamames. Thanks for posting

[Frances_B]

Possible links between gut health and many health conditions have been in the spotlight for some time now, but please could you provide a link to the actual article so people can read it in its entirely instead of just a summary or extract of an unknown percentage of the article. Your user profile gives a lot of details about what you do as a researcher, so you know the importance of providing links to sources so that people can read things for themselves and satisfy themselves as to the validity and credentials of the source.

I note that it was a study in mice, and "MS" in mice is not the same as MS in humans - it is a condition artificially induced in a special strain of mice which has been bred over generations to be susceptible to a condition which emulates MS in humans. The most commonly used induced "MS" in mice is called experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) and is induced by given the mice a toxic substance that causes demyelination.

"In specific animal models, demyelination can be induced using toxins such as cuprizone and lysolecithin (Blakemore and Franklin, 2008). Additionally, transgenic models have been extensively investigated, particularly the T-cell receptor (TCR) (Olivares-Villagómez et al., 1998) and B-cell receptor (BCR) (Molnarfi et al., 2013) transgenic mouse lines that are specific to several myelin peptides."

sciencedirect.com/science/a...

While mice are still very widely used for studying various health conditions and testing possible drug treatments, the simple fact is that mice are mice and humans are humans - two very different species. This is why so many drugs which might look promising in mice studies or trials end up failing in human trials.

Yes, everything has to start somewhere, but these days I now look at anything that's still at the stage of being a study or trial in mice and tend go go "Ho hum, wake me up when it's actually produced proven results in humans and has actually been approved for use by drug approval authorities".