Inflammation bowel disease, a chronic disorder of the gastrointestinal tract, may be triggered by potassium deficiency and adding potassium rich foods to a diet can help reduce the risk of the disease, according to a new study conducted by a collaboration of scientists from India and the United States. Some foods rich in potassium are avocado, spinach, coconut water and banana.
Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis together constitute Inflammation bowel disease. Both are inflammatory diseases but Crohn’s most commonly affects the end of the small bowel and the beginning of the colon, but it may affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract, from the mouth to the anus, while ulcerative colitis is limited to the colon or large intestine. Symptoms of both diseases include abdominal pain, diarrhea, fever and weight loss.
A healthy bowel is maintained by a fine balacne between between Th1 and Th17 cells of the immune system that promote inflammation as an immune response and the Foxp3+ T-regulatory cells that modulate the immune response so as to prevent the body from attacking itself. But sometimes, due to environmental and gut microbial triggers, the T-cell immune balance may get disrupted and result in inflammation bowel disease, which often requires lifelong medical therapy.
In a study, researchers from the Translational Health Science Technology Institute in Faridabad and from the Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard Medical School followed nearly 1,70,000 US women for over 20 years and screened them for potassium content in their urine. Their dietary intake was also monitored every 2-4 years.
The researchers found that dietary intake of potassium, but not sodium, was associated with decreased risk of developing Crohn’s disease. The team also found that extracellular potassium modifies the T cell response to promote the generation of disease preventing T cells. At the same time, in an laboratory and outside of living cells, potassium was found to suppress the T-cells proliferation indicating its role in an anti-inflammatory function.
This first finding was published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology and the researchers say that more work needs to be done to discover the precise mechanisms by which dietary potassium regulates the immune response of the gastrointestinal tract.