Posted on 06/26/2002 2:59:52 PM PDT by Pharmboy
BERLIN (Reuters Health) - Eating certain smoked sausages in childhood may increase the risk of developing the crippling autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS) later in life, researchers said on Wednesday.
The findings support other studies that have pointed to a possible link and suggest that nitrates used in meat preparation combined with chemicals in smoke could be causing autoimmune problems.
In MS, the slow destruction of myelin--the thin, protective coating that insulates nerve fibers in the brain and spine--leads to numbness, muscle weakness and stiffness, impaired vision and coordination problems.
Marcel Geilenkeuser, from the Darmstadt Clinic in Germany, and colleagues looked at the childhood diets of 177 MS patients and 88 healthy "control" individuals, focusing on how much hot-smoked sausage, cold-smoked sausage, cold-smoked meat and other foods such as butter and oat flakes they ate.
Geilenkeuser also took into account the socioeconomic status of the patients' families for his doctorate study, which he presented here at the 12th Meeting of the European Neurological Society.
The consumption of all three smoked meat products was associated with MS, he found. More detailed statistical analysis showed that hot-smoked sausages and animal-fat intake independently contributed to MS risk.
The researcher said he was cautious in interpreting the results.
"There were a number of drawbacks to the way the study had to be done, for example, and I do not want anyone to take it as conclusive.
"Having said that though, it does support previous work which suggested a link between the combination of nitrates and nitrites used to prepare meat for production of smoked sausages, and the phenols from smoke, with the production of nitrophenols which are connected with autoimmunity problems."
He said that MS, which only emerged at the start of the 19th century, could not be only related to the chemicals in wood smoke. Communities in northern Europe, he said, had smoked their foods for many centuries without developing MS, but had not used nitrates on the meat or fish before smoking.
Nitrogenous chemicals are generally used to ensure that meat does not lose its colour during the smoking process, he said.
Further study of the subject would be justified, he said, with ideally 200 newly diagnosed MS patients and a 200-strong control group of healthy individuals.
MS does have a propensity for northern Europeans. It had always been thought that it was mainly a genetic predisposition. While it still may be, this is certainly an interesting finding.
Maybe we on FR should design the perfect liberal scientific study...
And remember: disease is always an interaction between genes and environment.
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