An article that was published last Tuesday by a team of German microbiologists suggested that dietary salt can help humans and animals fight off skin-microbes.
As they were observing some of their lab mice, the team noticed that every time one of these mice got bitten by another mouse, large amounts of sodium started accumulating on the site of bite. They observed similar sodium accumulations on infected and recently-damaged human skin.
“Up to now, salt has been regarded as a detrimental dietary factor. Our current study challenges this one-sided view and suggests that increasing salt accumulation at the site of infections might be an ancient strategy to ward off infections, long before antibiotics were invented,” said lead author Jonathan Jantsch.
Additional experimentation allowed the team to prove that sodium can indeed act like an antibiotic; they found out that those mice who consumed more salt than others increased the activity of their macrophages (which are cells that can fight different kinds of pathogens and microbes).
These findings somewhat contradict the hypothesis that any excess salt should actually be rejected by the body, since it can lead to high blood pressure and to an increased risk for stroke and heart disease.
This consideration led Jantsch’s team to insist that these are preliminary results, and that their findings do not imply that we should change our dietary habits at this time. This was explicitly pointed out by Jantsch who said that, “due to the overwhelming clinical studies demonstrating that high dietary salt is detrimental to hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, we feel that at present our data does not justify recommendations on high dietary salt in the general population.”
The team’s directions for further work include finding out if there are any other reasons why salt accumulates in the skin of older adults, and developing a drug that could pinpoint where salt tends to accumulate on a person’s skin. The team hopes to eventually be able to put together a formula for salt- based wound dressings and antimicrobial therapies.
Jantsch said, “a further understanding of the regulatory cascades might not only help to design drugs that specifically enhance local salt deposition and help to combat infectious diseases, but also may lead to novel strategies to mobilize sodium stores in the aging population and prevent cardiovascular disease.”
Lead author Jonathan Jantsch is a microbiologist at Universitätsklinikum Regensburg and Universität Regensburg.
The findings were published by Cell Press on March 3, 2015, under the title Cutaneous Na+ Storage Strengthens the Antimicrobial Barrier Function of the Skin and Boosts Macrophage-Driven Host Defense.”
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