Growing older and a high-fat diet enriched with omega 6 fatty acids are major contributors to health risks ranging from diabetes to heart failure. How these two factors regulate the immune response is not well-understood.
Ganesh Halade, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and other institutions have investigated how aging and an obesity-generating omega 6-enriched diet impact microflora in the gut, the structure and function of the spleen, and a subsequent immune response to heart attack, using a mouse model.
In a study published in the FASEB Journal, they report that a calorie-dense, obesity-generating diet in aging mice disrupted the composition of the gut microbiome, and that correlated with development of a systemwide nonresolving inflammation in acute heart failure, with disruptions of the immune cell profile — notably the neutrophil-leukocyte ratio.