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ScienceMag.org reports that salt is preferentially deposited at the site of skin wounds.
Scientists only recently learned that the connective tissue of skin can serve as a reservoir for sodium ions when we consume large amounts of salt. When Jens Titze, a clinical pharmacologist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville was studying dietary salt intake in mice, he noticed that even mice on low-salt diets had unusually high salt concentrations in wounded skin. Titze and his colleagues realized that immune cells arriving in wounded skin to fight infections were entering a salty microenvironment. They hypothesized that the body was shuffling salt to infected skin to protect against invaders.
The scientists wondered if the higher salt concentration near wounds might affect immune responses, so they cultured macrophages from mice, and added salt to raise the level to what they saw in skin near wounds. They then challenged the macrophages with a common infectious agents.
Salt increased the microbe-killing capacity of the immune cells, the team reports; the macrophages exposed to high levels of sodium chloride released significantly more microbicidal molecules than those that grew in a culture medium without salt. Next, the team infected macrophages with the common pathogens Escherichia coli or Leishmania major. After 24 hours, the E. coli load in macrophages exposed to high sodium chloride levels was less than half of that of macrophages cultured without salt, and L. major infections were down as well.
The effect was seen even in salt levels found in mice on low-salt diets. They then went on to compare the effect in mice fed either a high or low salt diet, and found that the higher salt mice fought infections much better.
They also caution that there may be better ways to increase salt in the skin than adding it to your diet, such as applying it to wounds directly as part of the treatment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @11:32AM
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