Warning: New Inquiry Indicates That Even Short-Term Exposure To A High-Fat Diet Tin Trigger Pain

A recent study of mice conducted past researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas found that brusque-term consumption of a high-fat diet may live linked to pain sensations, even without a preexisting injury or status such as obesity or diabetes.

The report, published inward Scientific Reports, compared the effects of unlike diets on ii groups of mice. One grouping was fed normal chow, piece the other was given a high-fat diet that did non cause obesity or high blood sugar, both of which tin can atomic number 82 to diabetic neuropathy and other types of pain.

The researchers institute that the high-fatty diet induced hyperalgesic priming — a neurological change that represents the transition from acuate to chronic hurting — as well as allodynia, which is hurting resulting from stimuli that make non commonly provoke hurting.

“This study indicates y’all don’t take obesity to trigger hurting; yous don’t necessitate diabetes; you don’t involve a pathology or injury at all,” said Dr. Michael Burton, assistant professor of neuroscience inwards the School of Behavioral as well as Brain Sciences in addition to corresponding author of the article. “Eating a high-fatty diet for a brusk catamenia of time is enough — a diet like to what virtually all of us inward the U.southward. eat at or so bespeak.”

The report as well compared fat, diabetic mice alongside those that merely experienced dietary changes.

“It became clear, surprisingly, that you don’t demand an underlying pathology or obesity. You just needed the diet,” jajang said. “This is the commencement study to demonstrate the influential office of a brusk exposure to a high-fatty diet to allodynia or chronic hurting.”

Western diets are rich in fats — inwards detail, saturated fats, which have proved to be responsible for an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and associated weather condition. Individuals who consume high amounts of saturated fats — like butter, cheese, in addition to red inwardness — have high amounts of complimentary fatty acids circulating inward their bloodstream that in plough cause systemic inflammation.

Recently, scientists accept shown that these high-fatty diets too increment existing mechanical pain sensitivity in the absence of obesity too that they can aggravate preexisting weather condition or hinder recovery from injury. No studies, however, have clarified how high-fat diets alone can live a sensitizing ingredient inwards inducing pain from nonpainful stimuli, such as a calorie-free impact the pare, Burton said.

“We’ve seen inward the past that, inwards models of diabetes or obesity, entirely a subsection of the people or animals experience allodynia, as well as if they make, it varies across a spectrum, together with it isn’t clear why,” Burton said. “We hypothesized that in that location had to live other precipitating factors.”

Burton too his squad looked for saturated fatty acids inwards the blood of the mice fed the high-fat diet. They establish that a type of fat acid called palmitic acid — the nigh common saturated fat acid inward animals — binds to a detail receptor on nerve cells, a process that results inward inflammation in addition to mimics injury to the neurons.

“The metabolites from the diet are causing inflammation earlier nosotros see pathology develop,” Burton said. “Diet itself caused markers of neuronal.

“Now that we come across that it’second the sensory neurons that are affected, how is it happening? We discovered that if you take away the receptor that the palmitic acid binds to, you don’t meet that sensitizing effect on those neurons. That suggests at that place’sec a way to block it pharmacologically.”

Burton said the side by side pace volition live to focus on the neurons themselves — how they are activated as well as how injuries to them can be reversed. It is function of a larger endeavor to empathize ameliorate the transition from sharp to chronic pain.

“The mechanism behind this transition is of import because it is the presence of chronic hurting — from whatsoever origin — that is fueling the opioid epidemic,” he said. “If nosotros figure out a manner to foreclose that transition from needlelike to chronic, it could make a lot of skillful.”

Burton said he hopes his inquiry encourages healthcare professionals to view the role diet plays inward influencing pain.

“The biggest argue we make research like this is because nosotros want to understand our physiology completely,” he said. “Now, when a patient goes to a clinician, they treat a symptom, based on an underlying illness or condition. Maybe we demand to pay more attending to how the patient got there: Does the patient accept diabetes-induced or obesity-induced inflammation; has a terrible diet sensitized them to hurting more than they realized? That would live a epitome shift.”

Reference: “High-fatty diet causes mechanical allodynia inward the absence of injury or diabetic pathology” by Jessica A. Tierney, Calvin D. Uong, Melissa due east. Lenert, Marisa Williams as well as Michael D. Burton, ane September 2022, Scientific Reports.

The written report was funded past the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive as well as Kidney Diseases, the UT System STARS (Science in addition to Technology Acquisition in addition to Retention) programme, the American Pain Society, in addition to the Rita Allen Foundation.