14. 2
grams
Average daily fiber
consumption by 2- to
6-year-olds, Burkina Faso
8. 4
grams
Average daily fiber
consumption by 2- to
6-year-olds, Italy
Young man’s dreams, old man’s fate
Disorder can presage neurodegenerative disease by decades
By Laura Sanders
Vivid, violent dreams can foreshadow
brain disorders half a century later, a
new study finds. The finding, reported
in the Aug. 10 Neurology, highlights how
some neurological diseases may take hold
decades before diagnosis and suggests
that spotting warning signs may allow
doctors to monitor and treat patients
long before the brain deteriorates.
People with a mysterious condition
called REM sleep behavior disorder, or
RBD, have violent dreams that frequently
involve fighting off an attacker. The normal muscle paralysis that accompanies
dreams is gone, leaving the dreamer, who
is most often male, to act out the dream’s
punches, twists and yells.
Doctors used to think of RBD as an
isolated disorder. But follow-up studies
revealed that a striking number of these
patients later develop neurodegen-
erative diseases, including Parkinson’s
disease and Lewy body dementia. Esti-
mates vary, but research suggests that
anywhere from 80 to 100 percent even-
tually get a neurodegenerative disorder.
Gut flora reflects
children’s diets
Africans have more versatile
and robust intestinal bacteria
By Gwyneth Dickey
A termite a day may keep the doctor away.
African children who eat a high-fiber
diet (and the occasional wood-digesting
insect) have gut bacteria that help protect them from diarrhea and inflammatory disease, a new study finds. The
research may lead to new probiotics that
improve the digestive health of Westerners, who were found to have a less versatile assemblage of intestinal microbes.
Duccio Cavalieri, a microbiologist
at the University of Florence in Italy,
and his team compared the DNA in
gut microbes of 29 healthy children
ages 1 to 6 from Burkina Faso and Italy.
The African children ate a diet high in
fiber, cereals, nonanimal protein and
plants, while the European children ate
a typical Western diet high in animal
protein, sugar and fat, and low in fiber.
Breast-fed children from the two
groups had similar gut bacteria, likely
because the children eat the same food.
But in older children the gut micro-flora of the two groups started to look
different. The results were published
online August 2 in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Children from Burkina Faso had
high numbers of bacteria that digest
plant fibers. Also found in the guts of
termites, these bacteria break down
fibers that humans typically can’t. The
bacteria make short-chain fatty acids
previously shown to provide energy
and protection from inflammatory gut
diseases such as Crohn’s disease.
