Micronutrient deficiencies, DNA damage and degenerative diseases

In my last post I talked about micronutrient triage. When micronutrients — vitamins and minerals — are in short supply they are preferentially allocated to physiological functions crucial for survival; maintenance and repair are temporarily put on hold (1). If our diets are chronically deficient in micronutrients, the prolonged neglect of vital repair functions is bound to take its toll.

That vitamins and minerals play a crucial role in health and disease should come as no surprise. Vitamins are defined as substances that the body needs but cannot make; and we obviously cannot make minerals. Vitamins and minerals act as antioxidants, stabilize protein structures and are enzyme cofactors. They are involved in all aspects of physiology, starting with such fundamental processes as DNA maintenance and gene expression.

Inefficient or incorrect DNA repair due to micronutrient shortages leads to genome instability, a known contributor to increased cancer risk, accelerated aging and neurodegenerative diseases (2). Genome damage caused by micronutrient deficiencies is believed to be at least as extensive as genome damage from environmental genotoxins like chemical carcinogens, UV and ionizing radiation. Genome instability caused by micronutrient deficiencies in turn increases DNA sensitivity to environmental genotoxic stressors.

Since degenerative diseases, the main health problems in the developed world, are partly caused by DNA damage, it makes sense to diagnose and nutritionally prevent the underlying cause, genome instability. This requires a knowledge of optimal intakes for vitamins and minerals that are needed to prevent DNA damage (2):
  • "Excessive genome instability, a fundamental cause of disease, is often an indication of micronutrient deficiency and is therefore preventable
  • accurate diagnosis of genome instability using DNA damage biomarkers that are sensitive to micronutrient deficiency is technically feasible
  • it should be possible to optimise nutritional status and verify efficacy by diagnosis of a reduction in genome damage rate after intervention"

Vitamins C, E, B2, B6, B12, folate and niacin, and the minerals zinc, iron, magnesium and manganese are some of the micronutrients known to be critical to genome stability (2). Optimal intakes of most of these micronutrients have not yet been determined, but for those that have been studied — e.g. folate and vitamin B12 — intakes in excess of current RDA values are required to prevent genome damage. Optimal micronutrient intakes will also vary with people′s genetic make-up.

Optimizing micronutrient intakes seems like a promising way to reduce the degenerative disease burdens threatening to bankrupt medical care systems:

"… instead of diagnosing and treating diseases caused by genome damage, health and medical practitioners will be trained to diagnose and nutritionally prevent the initiating cause, i.e. genome instability itself." (2).

We′ll see.

Sources:
  1. Ames BN. Low micronutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative diseases of aging through allocation of scarce resources by triage. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2006;103(47):17589-17594.
    http://www.pnas.org/content/103/47/17589.full.pdf
  2. Fenech M. Nutritional treatment of genome instability: a paradigm shift in disease prevention and in the setting of recommended dietary allowances. Nutr Res Rev 2003;16:109-122.
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0278-6915(02)00028-5
Posted by Helmut Beierbeck at 3/4/2010 1:54 PM
Categories: minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, nutrition
 

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