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A daily dose of baking soda may reduce the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, according to the Medical College of Georgia scientists, the antacid can encourage human spleen to promote an anti-inflammatory environment that could be therapeutic for inflammatory disease. When rats or healthy people drink a solution of baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal.
Mesothelial cells line body cavities, like the one that contains the digestive tract, they cover the exterior of human organs to literally keep them from rubbing together, these cells also provide another level of protection. They have little fingers- microvilli, that sense the environment, and warn the organs they cover that there is an invader and an immune response is needed.
Drinking baking soda makes the spleen – which is part of the immune system, to acts like a big blood filter and is where some white blood cells, like macrophages, are stored – to go easy on the immune response. Drinking bicarbonate affects the spleen through the mesothelial cells. The conversation which occurs with the help of the chemical messenger acetylcholine promotes a landscape that shifts against inflammation.
In the spleen, as well as the blood and kidneys, after drinking water with baking soda for two weeks, the population of immune cells- macrophages, shifted from those that promote inflammation-M1, to those that reduce it- M2. Macrophages are known for their ability to consume garbage in the body like debris from injured or dead cells.
In the case of the lab animals, the problems were hypertension and chronic kidney disease, one of the many functions of the kidneys is balancing compounds like acid, potassium and sodium. With kidney disease, there is impaired kidney function and one of the resulting problems can be that the blood becomes too acidic, this can cause cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.
Clinical trials have shown that a daily dose of baking soda can not only reduce acidity but slow progression of the kidney disease, and it’s now a therapy offered to patients. Looking at a rat model without kidney damage, they saw the same response. The scientists worked with the investigators at MCG’s Georgia Prevention Institute to bring in healthy medical students who drank baking soda in a bottle of water and also had a similar response.
They saw a shift in other immune cell types, like more regulatory T cells, which generally drive down the immune response and keep the immune system from attacking own tissues. The anti-inflammatory shift was sustained for at least four hours in humans and three days in rats. The shift ties back to the mesothelial cells and their conversations with human spleen with the help of acetylcholine.
Part of the new information about mesothelial cells is that they are neuron-like, but not neurons. The spleen got bigger with consuming baking soda because of the anti-inflammatory stimulus it produces. Infection can also increase spleen size and physicians often palpate the spleen when concerned about a big infection. Other cells besides neurons are known to use the chemical communicator acetylcholine.
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