Western Food Habits Aggravate Sepsis

A high fat diet is generally unhealthy but it appears that it also aggravates sepsis, a new experimental study in mice suggests.

Sepsis is a very serious medical condition that manifests itself through a whole-body inflammatory state – a systemic inflammatory response syndrome or SIRS, due to the presence of a known or suspected infection.

Chantal Rivera, PhD Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-Shreveport and her colleagues, carried out a study in mice, which has proved that a diet highly saturated in fat, sugars and cholesterol exacerbates the inflammatory response in sepsis.

Obesity due to the consumption of a western-style diet in the United States is a major problem, as obese patients with sepsis also have an exaggerated morbidity.

The goal of this new study was to analyze the influence of chronic western-style diet consumption on hepatic inflammation in mice, who underwent surgical induction of sepsis.

Dr Rivera's team had been feeding the mice normal chow or western diet for three weeks before the experiment.

Mice on the western diet manifested a very severe inflammation that was resolved by signaling through the toll-like receptor 4 pathway.

“These results suggest that targeting the TLR signaling pathway as a therapeutic approach to the medical management of sepsis may be especially beneficial in obese patients,” Dr Rivera said.

She added that “mortality due to sepsis in morbidly obese subjects is estimated to be 7 times more prevalent compared to mortality in lean individuals, and it is also more severe.

“Results from our recent studies suggest that this adverse outcome may be caused by consuming a high-fat diet, which predisposes the immune system to react more strongly to infection.”

This experimental study in mice has been published today in the open access journal BMC Physiology.