the spleen--aided by sodium bicarbonate--tells white blood cells to go easy on the immune response

April 25, 2018

Source:  Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University

  Drinking baking soda, the MCG 

scientists think, tells the spleen--part of the immune system which acts like a big blood filter and is where some white blood cells, like macrophages, are stored-- to go easy on the immune 

response. "Certainly drinking bicarbonate affects the spleen and we think it's through the mesothelial cells," O'Connor says.

  The conversation, which occurs with the help of the chemical messenger acetylcholine, appears to promote a landscape that shifts against 

inflammation, they report.

  In the spleen as well as the blood and kidneys they found after drinking water with baking soda for two weeks, the population of immune cells called macrophages, shifted from primarily those that promote inflammation, called M1, to those that reduce it, called M2. Macrophages, perhaps best known for their ability to consume garbage in the body like debris from injured or dead cells, are early arrivers to a call for an immune response.

  In the case of the lab animals, the problems were hypertension and 

chronic kidney disease, problems which got O'Connor's lab thinking about 

baking soda.

  One of the many functions of the 

kidneys is balancing important 

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, O'Connor says. Significant consequences can include increased risk of cardiovascular 

disease and osteoporosis.  "It sets the whole system up to fail basically," 

Dr. Paul O'Connor, renal physiologist in the MCG Department of Physiology at Augusta University says.  

  Clinical trials have shown that a daily dose of baking soda can not only 

reduce acidity but actually slow 

progression of the kidney disease, and it's now a therapy offered to patients.

  "We started thinking, how does baking soda slow progression of kidney 

disease?" O'Connor says. That's when the anti-inflammatory impact began to unfold as they saw reduced numbers of M1s and increased M2s in their kidney disease model after consuming the common compound.  When they looked at a rat model without actual kidney damage, they saw the same response. So the basic 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.

  "The shift from inflammatory to an 

anti-inflammatory profile is happening everywhere," O'Connor says. "We saw it in the kidneys, we saw it in the spleen, now we see it in the peripheral blood.”…

  the treatment also attenuates 

inflammation and disease severity in rheumatoid arthritis, researchers at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research reported in 2016 in the journal 

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

  O'Connor hopes drinking baking soda can one day produce similar results for people with autoimmune disease.  "You are not really turning anything off or on, you are just pushing it toward one side by giving an anti-inflammatory 

stimulus," he says, in this case, away from harmful inflammation. "It's 

potentially a really safe way to treat 

inflammatory disease.”…The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180425093745.htm
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This treatment of baking soda (1/2 teaspoon every two hours 3x day) has worked against 1918 H1N1 virus pandemic that killed 30-50 million people worldwide.   -r, mt. shasta