Study: "Glutathione Protects Against Asthma"

Many of our readers may already know that Glutathione is our body's main antioxidant... Now, a study shows that Glutathione protects against asthma... [For information about Cellgevity which boosts glutathione levels, visit www.max.com/39160 ]
"...Serendipitously, while the GABRIELA investigators were studying the relationship between raw milk and asthma, researchers from the Emory University Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics and the Children’s Health Care of Atlanta Center for Developmental Lung Biology were preparing a massive 102-page tome reviewing the relationship between glutathione and asthma.  They published it this March in the journal Antioxidants and Redox Signaling (5).

Glutathione plays four major roles within the body:
 •Safe storage of the highly vulnerable and potentially toxic amino acid cysteine.
 •Protection against oxidative stress.
 •Detoxification.
 •Cellular communication and regulation of protein function.

Glutathione is generally present in the highest concentrations inside cells rather than outside.  Indeed, most cells contain between a hundred and a thousand times more glutathione than is present in our blood.  The extracellular fluid of the lungs, by contrast, is an exception to the rule.  Glutathione concentrations there are a hundred times higher than in our blood, rivaling the concentrations within many cells.  These high glutathione concentrations in lung fluid appear to have at least two special roles:
 •A high concentration of glutathione is necessary to maintain the fluidity of mucus.
 •Glutathione combines with another chemical called nitric oxide to produce nitrosoglutathione.

Nitric oxide is glutathione’s jet pack.  When this G gets his nitrous on, he becomes a bronchodilator 100 times more supercharged than theophylline, a once-common asthma drug that has largely been abandoned because of its side effects.  This means that nitrosoglutathione decreases resistance in the airway and increases the flow of air to the lungs — exactly what asthma drugs are designed to do!  In fact, nitrosoglutathione dilates the bronchioles by stimulating the same receptors as albuterol, a common asthma drug (6).  Inhaled corticosteroids synergize with albuterol by increasing the production of these receptors (7).

Could asthma largely result from a deficiency of glutathione and nitrosoglutathione in the extracellular fluid of the lungs?  Data presented in the recent review would suggest so (5).  Among the most compelling of these data we find two startling facts:
 •Children with severe asthma have three times less glutathione in their lung fluid than healthy adults and two times less than children with moderate asthma, while they have two to four times as much oxidized glutathione.  They also have 30 percent less cysteine in their blood, suggesting that they may not have enough cysteine to keep producing the glutathione they need.
 •Asthmatics have 70 to 90 percent less nitrosoglutathione in their lung fluid as healthy controls, and nitrosoglutathione becomes undetectable during severe asthma attacks.

Scientists are currently focusing on the role of an enzyme that destroys nitrosoglutathione.  The activity of this enzyme is increased in asthma, and researchers are currently studying whether genetic variations or inflammatory insults are responsible for this increase.  Test tube studies, however, suggest that glutathione itself suppresses the activity of this enzyme (8).  Thus, the more glutathione we have, the more nitrosoglutathione we should have.

It may be the case, then, that asthma results largely from a deficiency of glutathione in the lung fluid while common asthma drugs like corticosteroids and albuterol are simply band-aid solutions aimed at replacing the natural effects of glutathione with cheap imitations...."

Source: Dr. Joseph Mecola...
Notes:
5.  Fitzpatrick AM, Jones DP, Brown LA. Glutathione Redox Control of Asthma: From Molecular Mechanisms to Therapeutic Opportunities. Antioxid Redox Signal. 2012; Mar 9 [Epub ahead of print]

6.  Que LG, Liu L, Yan Y, Whitehead GS, Gavett SH, Schwartz DA, Stamler JS. Protection from experimental asthma by an endogenous bronchodilator. Science. 2005;308(5728):1618-21.

7.  de Benedictis FM, Bush A. Corticosteroids in respiratory diseases in children. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2012;185(1):12-23.

8.  Thompson CM, Sonawane B, Graftstrom RC.  The ontongeny, distribution, and regulation of alcohol dehydrogenase 3: implications for pulmonary physiology. Drug Metab Dispos. 2009;37(8):1565-71.

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