When it comes to wellness, parasitic worms might not be the first thing you think of, especially as these organisms are still a major cause of harm to the wellbeing of people throughout much of the developing world, in terms of disease and disability. However, new research by a team of scientists now at the University of Georgia, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Université François Rabelais in Tours, France, and the Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China says that parasites aren’t all bad, and can secrete a sugar-based anti-inflammatory molecule that might actually help treat metabolic disorders associated with excessive weight gain and obesity.
According to Donald Harn, study co-author who worked on the research while at Harvard School of Public Health and is now Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Infectious Diseases, the parasites release this sugar molecule, or glycan, to evade your body’s immune system because reducing inflammation means they can hide more easily in tissues and give you less symptoms that will alert you to their presence. Harn says ‘Obesity is an inflammatory disease, so we hypothesized that this sugar might have some effect on complications related to it’.
For the study, the researchers fed mice on a high-fat diet, and the mice in the control group exhibited many symptoms, such as insulin resistance, high triglycerides and high cholesterol, which are associated with excessive weight gain. The mice who received the sugar treatment still gained weight, but they did not, on the other hand, suffer the same negative health effects.
According to Harn, who is also a member of UGA’s Faculty of Infectious Diseases and the Centre for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, ‘All of the metabolic indicators associated with obesity were restored to normal by giving these mice this sugar conjugate’ though he warns that this treatment ‘won’t prevent obesity, but it will help alleviate some of the problems caused by it.’
Harn suspects that as these sugars are also found in the developing human foetus and in human breast milk, these may help to establish proper metabolic functions in the newborn infant, though this sugar expression is only found in a few cells beyond infancy. However, Harn says you shouldn’t go looking for parasitic infections as treatment, but they could serve as the basis for future research for therapies.
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