[LUM#10] Less salt for more life
Less salt for fewer cardiovascular accidents? That's what Caroline Desmetz's research suggests, showing that a salt-depleted diet reduces the risk of cardiac fibrosis.
In France and other developed countries, one in six men over the age of 40 is affected by metabolic syndrome. This pathology combines "hypertension with a metabolic disorder such as insulin resistance, responsible for type 2 diabetes, or obesity", explains Caroline Desmetz, a teacher-researcher at the Cardiometabolic Biocommunication Laboratory in the Faculty of Pharmacy. "It's the evil of our societies today.
An irreversible scar
A metabolic syndrome that triples the risk of cardiovascular accident, notably by promoting the appearance of cardiac fibrosis, in other words a kind of scar on the heart. "As with the skin, this scar is irreversible, and you have it for life. Except that your heart is a muscle that must be able to contract in order to function, which is what the scar will prevent," stresses the researcher. Fibrosis virtually undetectable before the accident.
Prescribing a salt-depleted diet as part of the metabolic syndrome could nevertheless help prevent the appearance of these lesions. This, at any rate, is what initial experiments on rats have shown. Rodents suffering from the equivalent of metabolic syndrome but on a de-sodulated diet actually developed less fibrosis than the same animals consuming a normal amount of salt.
Salt-sensitive genes
How does salt, or rather the lack of it, affect the mechanism of fibrosis? Two possible answers have emerged. Firstly, Caroline Desmetz and her team observed in rodents on a salt-free diet "a reduction in the presence of certain immune cells responsible for inflammation that alters the heart muscle and creates lesions".
But the researcher was particularly interested in the effect of a deodorized diet on the expression of certain genes during a little-described phenomenon in the mechanism of fibrosis called endothelial-mesenchymal transition, which designates "the transformation of endothelial cells (of vessels) into fibroblasts. These cells secrete the collagen responsible for fibrosis.
Research award from the French Nutrition Society
According to Caroline Desmetz, current experiments seem to validate the fact that this phenomenon is indeed attenuated in animals on a de-sodized diet. What remains to be understood is "which genes are more specifically involved, and whether we can modulate them". Last July, Caroline Desmetz was awarded aresearch prize by the French Society of Nutrition, which enabled her "to recruit a Master's student and pay for the reagents needed for the experiments".
UM podcasts are now available on your favorite platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Apple podcasts, Amazon Music...).