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How broccoli can protect your arteries

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How broccoli can protect your arteries

It’s long been thought that broccoli is good for your heart, and now British scientists think they know why.

Researchers at Imperial College London have found evidence a chemical in broccoli and other green leafy vegetables could boost a natural defense mechanism that protects arteries from the clogging that can cause heart attacks.

In a study funded by the British Heart Foundation charity and conducted on mice, the researchers found that sulforaphane — a compound occurring naturally in broccoli and other brassicas — could “switch on” a protective protein which is inactive in parts of the arteries vulnerable to clogging.

“We know that vegetables are clearly good for you, but surprisingly the molecular mechanisms of why they are good for you have remained unknown for many years,” said Paul Evans of the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College.

“This study provides a possible explanation for how green vegetable consumption can promote a healthy heart.”

Scientists already know that arteries don’t clog up in a uniform way, but that there are bends and branches of blood vessels — where blood flow is disrupted or slower — which are much more prone to the build-up of fatty plaques that cause heart disease.

Evans said his research found that in the more vulnerable areas, a normally protective protein known as Nrf2 is inactive.

“What our study showed was that sulforaphane can protect those regions by switching on the Nrf2,” he said.

The research, reported in the journal Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, was conducted using purified sulforaphane, not broccoli. Researchers said the next step was to test the effect of the chemical as it is found in vegetables.

We now need to go and test this with broccoli smoothies, as it were, and compare that with the effect of purified sulforaphane,” Evans said, adding that if the vegetable form proved less effective, there could be an argument for taking sulforaphane in pill form.

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Human Bodies Make Their Own Morphine

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A laboratory morphine vial from the 1880s.

Our bodies produce a small but steady amount of natural morphine, a new study suggests.

Traces of the chemical are often found in mouse and human urine, leading scientists to wonder whether the drug is being made naturally or being delivered by something the subjects consumed.

The new research shows that mice produce the “incredible painkiller”—and that humans and other mammals possess the same chemical road map for making it, said study co-author Meinhart Zenk, who studies plant-based pharmaceuticals at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

In the study, researchers injected mice with an extra dose of a natural brain chemical called tetrahydropapaveroline (THP), which humans and mice are known to produce.

Using a tool called a mass spectrometer to analyze the mouse urine, the team was able to tell that THP underwent chemical changes in the body that created morphine, according to the study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What’s more, the study found that mouse morphine is produced in nearly the same way as the morphine in poppies—the only morphine-making plants known to science.

Morphine a Defense Mechanism?

But “the big question is, What is it for?” Zenk said of the mammal-made morphine.

THP must undergo a complicated, 17-step process in the body to create morphine. Even so, the chemical has evolved twice—in poppies and in mammals—suggesting it’s somehow valuable for survival.

In the well-studied poppy plant, scientists suspect morphine acts as a defense against predators. For instance, a rabbit eating—and thus killing—a morphine-laced poppy may become sluggish, making itself easy prey for a passing hawk.

Likewise, Zenk noted, if an animal attacks a person, even background levels of morphine may block out enough pain to allow the person to escape. (Explore the human body.)

For now, however, this is “absolute speculation,” Zenk said. Next he plans to test the urine of people who have endured horrible pain—such as traffic-accident victims—to see if their bodies spiked morphine levels.

It’s also difficult to say whether the discovery will yield any new treatments, Zenk added. (Related: “Toxic Snail Venoms Yielding New Painkillers, Drugs.”)

But it’s possible that scientists could someday induce a person’s body to create a natural jolt of morphine that might prove less damaging than injecting the substance into the body. Morphine shots can carry many side effects, he said—especially constipation.

Study exposes how bacteria resist antibiotics

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Study exposes how bacteria resist antibiotics

Scientists have discovered how bacteria fend off a wide range of antibiotics, and blocking that defense mechanism could give existing antibiotics more power to fight dangerous infections.

Researchers at New York University said on Thursday that bacteria produce certain nitric oxide-producing enzymes to resist antibiotics.

Drugs that inhibit these enzymes can make antibiotics much more potent, making even deadly superbugs like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA succumb, they said.

“Developing new medications to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA is a huge hurdle, associated with great cost and countless safety issues,” said Evgeny Nudler of NYU Langone Medical Center, whose study appears in the journal Science.

“Here, we have a short cut, where we don’t have to invent new antibiotics. Instead, we can enhance the activity of well-established ones, making them more effective at lower doses,” he said in a statement.

Drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide, killing about 19,000 people a year in the United States.

Nudler’s team found that many antibiotics kill bacteria through the production of harmful charged particles known as reactive oxygen species, otherwise called oxidative stress.

“Antibiotics cause bacteria to produce a lot of reactive oxygen species. Those damage DNA, and bacteria cannot survive. They eventually die,” Nudler said in a telephone interview.

We found nitric oxide can protect bacteria against oxidative stress.”

He said bacteria produce nitric oxide to resist antibiotics. The defense mechanism appears to apply broadly to many different types of antibiotics, he said.

Nudler said many companies are testing various nitric oxide-lowering compounds called nitric oxide synthase inhibitors for use as anti-inflammatory drugs.

He thinks a compound in this class could be made to reduce the amount of nitric oxide bacteria can produce, reducing their ability to resist antibiotics. That would mean researchers would not need to discover new antibiotics.

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