Kiwi antioxidant may protect against liver disease
"Pyrroloquinoline quinone, or PQQ, is an antioxidant found in soil and many foods and is enriched in human breast milk," said the study's lead author Karen Jonscher, PhD, an associate professor of anesthesiology and a physicist at CU Anschutz. "When given to obese mouse mothers during pregnancy and lactation, we found it protected their offspring from developing symptoms of liver fat and damage that leads to NAFLD in early adulthood."
The study, published online last week in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, is the first to demonstrate that PQQ can protect the offspring of obese mothers from the acceleration of obesity-induced liver disease.
NAFLD is a very common disease around the world and affects around 20-30 percent of all adults in the United States. Those who are obese face an even higher risk of developing the disease, around 60%. It heightens the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer.
"The goal of our study, which we carried out using a mouse model of obese pregnancy, was to determine whether a novel antioxidant given to mothers during pregnancy and breastfeeding could prevent the development of NAFLD in the offspring."
Their offspring were kept on the diets for 20 weeks. Those fed a Western diet gained more weight than those on a healthy diet. While the mice fed on the antioxidant didn't see reduced weight gain, it did decrease the amount of fats in their livers.
