6 research outputs found
Nutrition for the ageing brain: towards evidence for an optimal diet
As people age they become increasingly susceptible to chronic and extremely debilitating brain diseases. The precise cause of the neuronal degeneration underlying these disorders, and indeed normal brain ageing remains however elusive. Considering the limits of existing preventive methods, there is a desire to develop effective and safe strategies. Growing preclinical and clinical research in healthy individuals or at the early stage of cognitive decline has demonstrated the beneficial impact of nutrition on cognitive functions. The present review is the most recent in a series produced by the Nutrition and Mental Performance Task Force under the auspice of the International Life Sciences Institute Europe (ILSI Europe). The latest scientific advances specific to how dietary nutrients and non-nutrient may affect cognitive ageing are presented. Furthermore, several key points related to mechanisms contributing to brain ageing, pathological conditions affecting brain function, and brain biomarkers are also discussed. Overall, findings are inconsistent and fragmented and more research is warranted to determine the underlying mechanisms and to establish dose-response relationships for optimal brain maintenance in different population subgroups. Such approaches are likely to provide the necessary evidence to develop research portfolios that will inform about new dietary recommendations on how to prevent cognitive decline
Untargeted Metabolomics as a Screening Tool for Estimating Compliance to a Dietary Pattern
There is a growing interest in studying
the nutritional effects
of complex diets. For such studies, measurement of dietary compliance
is a challenge because the currently available compliance markers
cover only limited aspects of a diet. In the present study, an untargeted
metabolomics approach was used to develop a compliance measure in
urine to distinguish between two dietary patterns. A parallel intervention
study was carried out in which 181 participants were randomized to
follow either a New Nordic Diet (NND) or an Average Danish Diet (ADD)
for 6 months. Dietary intakes were closely monitored over the whole
study period, and 24 h urine samples as well as weighed dietary records
were collected several times during the study. The urine samples were
analyzed by UPLC-qTOF-MS, and a partial least-squares discriminant
analysis with feature selection was applied to develop a compliance
model based on data from 214 urine samples. The optimized model included
52 metabolites and had a misclassification rate of 19% in a validation
set containing 139 samples. The metabolites identified in the model
were markers of individual foods such as citrus, cocoa-containing
products, and fish as well as more general dietary traits such as
high fruit and vegetable intake or high intake of heat-treated foods.
It was easier to classify the ADD diet than the NND diet probably
due to seasonal variation in the food composition of NND and indications
of lower compliance among the NND subjects. In conclusion, untargeted
metabolomics is a promising approach to develop compliance measures
that cover the most important discriminant metabolites of complex
diets
Metabolomic profiling of spot urines from SU.VI.MAX2 subjects.
<p>Subjects reported either low or high consumption of coffee, represented by squares and circles respectively. A) One-dimensional OSC-PLS-DA score plot of urinary metabolomes of low and high consumers. B) Loading plot of the OSC-PLS-DA. Circled outlying ions contribute most strongly to the discrimination. C) Model validation assessed by permutation test (<i>n</i> = 100).</p
ROC curve AUCs for single and combination biomarkers.
<p>Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. cIP, cyclo(isoleucyl-prolyl); MX, 1-methylxanthine; Tr, trigonelline; Atr, atractyligenin glucuronides; Caf, caffeine.</p
Chemical structures of some identified discriminants.
<p>Chemical structures of some identified discriminants.</p
Mass Spectrometry-based Metabolomics for the Discovery of Biomarkers of Fruit and Vegetable Intake: Citrus Fruit as a Case Study
Elucidation
of the relationships between genotype, diet, and health
requires accurate dietary assessment. In intervention and epidemiological
studies, dietary assessment usually relies on questionnaires, which
are susceptible to recall bias. An alternative approach is to quantify
biomarkers of intake in biofluids, but few such markers have been
validated so far. Here we describe the use of metabolomics for the
discovery of nutritional biomarkers, using citrus fruits as a case
study. Three study designs were compared. Urinary metabolomes were
profiled for volunteers that had (a) consumed an acute dose of orange
or grapefruit juice, (b) consumed orange juice regularly for one month,
and (c) reported high or low consumption of citrus products for a
large cohort study. Some signals were found to reflect citrus consumption
in all three studies. Proline betaine and flavanone glucuronides were
identified as known biomarkers, but various other biomarkers were
revealed. Further, many signals that increased after citrus intake
in the acute study were not sensitive enough to discriminate high
and low citrus consumers in the cohort study. We propose that urine
profiling of cohort subjects stratified by consumption is an effective
strategy for discovery of sensitive biomarkers of consumption for
a wide range of foods