Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0038187 (starvation)
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In 1992, the worst drought in recorded history hit southern Africa. It especially affected the eastern area of Swaziland where staff at a rural district hospital, Good Shepherd Hospital in Siteki, struggled to treat rising numbers of ill and malnourished people. 10% of the population in this area reached the advanced stage of starvation. Almost 50% did not have enough food to meet their nutritional needs. Women had to travel as far as 15 miles to retrieve water from tankers and sometimes wait for days because other water sources evaporated. Maize did not grow. The subsistence farmers and their families, who made up most of the population, were able to use food stored from the year before, but it only postponed hunger. They sold their cattle (their symbol of wealth), borrowed money, and migrated to cities, leaving children and grandparents to provide for themselves. This area also had an influx of refugees from Mozambique who tended to receive more food than the natives. The incidence, but not the types, of diseases increased much during the drought. These diseases included diarrhea, respiratory infections, measles, marasmus, kwashiorkor, and vitamin deficiencies. The drought did reduce the incidence of malaria, however. Nongovernmental organizations helped with food and in measuring the effects of the drought, e.g., with anthropometric surveys of young children. The international community offered to send Swaziland more than 100,000 tons of cereal, but by December 1992 the cereal had not arrived. The people distributed the limited food to those most in need. The limited maize available for distribution was yellow, but the people were accustomed to white maize and believed yellow maize to be poisonous. When droughts occur, the crux of the problem in developing countries is the pressure exerted by multinational lending institutions to earn foreign currency to pay interest on national debt.
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PMID:Another African disaster. 846 97

The requirement of dietary nucleotide sources for maximal helper T-cell function has been demonstrated. The effect of dietary nucleotide restriction was tested during two forms of nutritional stress: starvation and protein malnutrition. In the starvation model, mice were fed chow diet, nucleotide free or nucleotide free supplemented with 0.25% yeast RNA, for at least 4 weeks. The animals were then starved for 5 days, at which time they were killed and mitogen assays were performed using spleen cells. Animals previously maintained on the nucleotide-free diet supplemented with RNA showed a significant increase in spontaneous concanavalin A and phytohemagglutinin-stimulated blastogenesis. Protein malnutrition was induced by feeding Balb/c mice a protein-free diet for 7 to 10 days. These mice then received either the protein-free diet, the nucleotide-free diet, or the nucleotide-free diet supplemented with 0.25% yeast RNA. Popliteal lymph node assays were then performed. The chow diet, nucleotide-free diet, and nucleotide-free diet supplemented with 0.25% yeast RNA led to a restoration of body weight, but only the chow and supplemented diets restored significant popliteal lymph node immune reactivity. These studies using starvation and protein-malnutrition models clearly indicate the nutritional role of nucleotides in the maintenance and restoration of the immune response.
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PMID:Dietary nucleotides reverse malnutrition and starvation-induced immunosuppression. 168 91

The first scientific understandings on the value of nutrition and the assimilation of food, in the Greek language "metabole" (metabolism), are published in the Corpus Hippocraticum. But the conception of metabolism was introduced in scientific literature not earlier than 1839 by Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and 1842 by Justus von Liebig (1803-1873). The antique ideas were completed in the 17th century by the theory of ferments, introduced by the iatro-chemist Johann Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644), and the Italian priest Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799) could proof the existence of such processes in the living organism by animal experiments in 1776. Then Schwann could discover in the gastric juice a substance in 1835 which he called "pepsin". In the time of the voyages of discovery new, not yet known malnutritions on the ships were known as scurvy, beriberi and in the northern countries rickets. Then it became clear that not only the three groups of food, but also supplementary materials, known in 1912 as vitamines by Casimir Funk (1884-1967), could develop determined effects. The starvation in the first and the second world war showed clearly, that deterioration of food supply diminished the condition of immunity. Failed food experiments with gelatin, synthetically produced citric acid and the discussions of malnutrition diseases, based on a deficiency of zinc, of toddlers, are discussed as the malnutrition illness kwashiorkor in the third world. In conclusion a citation of the famous American physiologist Graham Lusk (1866-1932) is mentioned from the year 1906, who praised the scientific priority of the German medical research.
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PMID:[Nutrition and individual defense--historical considerations]. 205 90

PCM can be usefully considered in terms of edematous (kwashiorkor-like) and nonedematous (marasmic) forms, as long as the limitations of the traditional terms are kept in mind. The body composition of subjects with undernutrition, or total starvation, both appear to maintain an extracellular fluid volume at a normal level, which increases as a percentage of the shrinking body weight. This is in contrast to patients with hospital malnutrition, in whom there is often an absolute increase in the extracellular volume while the body cell mass is shrinking. Data from the starvation literature suggest that the adult subject must gain approximately 10% of his or her body weight as extracellular expansion before edema is clinically evident. Preliminary evidence indicates that the hospitalized patient with the edematous form of malnutrition is at greater risk for complications and death when undergoing an operation, or requiring intensive care. The depleted patient who shows a rise in a depressed serum albumin after 7 to 10 days of TPN will have an improved prognosis when undergoing the stress of an elective operation. This improvement appears to be more the result of decreasing the expanded extracellular fluid volume than achieving a major increase in protein stores. The severely catabolic patient, particularly during episodes of major infection, can be expected to benefit by a nutritional intake that is carefully designed to provide calorie and nitrogen equilibrium. Nutritional intake high enough to guarantee positive balances of calories and nitrogen should be delayed until the acute catabolic stimulus has subsided, at which time the nutritional objective is to rebuild lost tissue.
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PMID:Forms of malnutrition in stressed and unstressed patients. 308 75

Several clinical, anthropometric and biochemical parameters have been used for the evaluation of the nutritional status and diagnosis of protein-energy malnutrition [1]. Analysis of the complete serum amino-acid spectrum by ion-exchange chromatography provides valuable information on the adequacy of protein intake and on the metabolic response to protein depletion in undernourished subjects. However, the serum aminogram is quite differently affected by acute or chronic starvation or the great variety of starchy but low-protein foods and further toxic factors (e.g. mycotoxins) leading to kwashiorkor. Thus, very complex alterations of the serum amino-acid spectrum had to be expected [5, 9] and stimulated the present investigation for reference purposes. We report the results of amino acid determinations in apparently healthy adult males and pregnant women taking the traditional Ethiopian diet. For want of a better evaluation of the specific nutritional influence, we also collected data on serum amino acids of healthy Ethiopians consuming an average European diet.
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PMID:Serum free amino acids of healthy males and pregnant women from Ethiopia. 343 81

The role of dietary protein deficiency in kwashiorkor is uncertain, although it has been shown not to be involved in the famine oedema of adults. A study of six different diets given to 103 children with oedematous malnutrition showed that the rate of loss of oedema was strongly correlated with the dietary energy intake (r = 0.75) but not with the protein intake (r = 0.03). 66 patients given a very-low protein diet (2.5% protein energy) lost oedema as fast as those given five times as much protein. The energy intake above which oedema resolved and below which oedema accumulated was 245-270 KJ/kg/day. Because energy deficiency is not invariably associated with oedema it cannot be the only factor involved, and the necessary dietary component(s) must therefore have been present in surfeit in all the therapeutic diets. This could be potassium together with factors necessary for its retention. The accessory ingredients must be low in foods associated with human and experimental nutritional oedema. It is suggested that protein deficiency is not the cause of the oedema of kwashiorkor and that there is no need to postulate a different pathogenesis for this oedema from starvation oedema of adults.
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PMID:Protein deficiency, energy deficiency, and the oedema of malnutrition. 612 17

Kwashiorkor kills millions of young children in the tropical Third World. It was believed to be a disease of protein starvation. The medical team headed by Professor Ralph Henrickse of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine has discovered that aflatoxin, a fungus toxin, may be the triggering factor in this disease which also impairs liver function. In New Zealand, we have a pasture fungus, the spores of which produce a liver toxin that has killed millions of animals this century and impaired the performance of millions more. New Zealand is a pastoral farming country with 70 million sheep and several million cattle. We now protect the animal with zinc medication. This paper describes the similarities between Kwashiorkor and the mycotoxic liver disease in New Zealand livestock, known locally as Facial Eczema. It describes briefly my discovery that pharmacological doses of zinc protected farm animals from pasture contaminated with the spores of the fungus Pithomyces chartarum, which contains the toxin sporidesmin. This paper proposes that Kwashiorkor and Facial Eczema are diseases with similar beginnings and a common end.
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PMID:Kwashiorkor. 649 86

Three patients had starvation-related hypoglycemia that was not responsive to the infusion of glucose. The patients resembled fatal cases of hypoglycemia seen very rarely in victims of kwashiorkor. None of the patients had a history of drug ingestion, nor was there any evidence of endocrine insufficiency. Two of the patients had low serum insulin levels. Complete postmortem examinations were done for all three patients and there was no evidence of islet cell abnormalities or of malignant neoplasms. A syndrome of severe hypoglycemia refractory to therapy, that was occasionally seen, in years past, in starved individuals is confirmed. The mechanisms underlying the disorder are obscure, but a failure of glycogenolysis, neoglucogenesis, or overproduction of insulin appear unlikely possibilities. It is postulated that cells normally impermeable to glucose, when serum insulin levels are low, become permeable in some severely starved patients, for reasons unknown.
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PMID:Glucose-resistant hypoglycemia in inanition. 680 96

Tens of thousands of Cambodian refugees are entering Thailand. Many of the new arrivals are survivors of months of starvation and are critically ill with marasmus, kwashiorkor, beriberi, anemia, malaria, diarrhea, and respiratory diseases. With volunteer medical help, field hospitals are treating patients under primitive conditions that are gradually improving. Based on experience at the Sa Kaeo refugee camp, a brief survey of the nutritional and other diseases likely to be encountered is given for the potential volunteer who may be unfamiliar with tropical medicine.
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PMID:Medical care of Cambodian refugees. 735 64

Nutritionists, including those involved in famine relief, have learned in the last 25 years that certain deficiency diseases arise from the high protein foods used to rehabilitate starving populations. Other, sometimes inappropriate relief foods starving populations. Other, sometimes inappropriate relief foods include unprocessed or inappropriate grains and unfortified dry skimmed milk. Yet, relief workers do not always receive the most appropriate food for distribution to certain populations. Millions of dollars are appropriated to protect relief supplies for starving people in Somalia, but money is not spent to develop and evaluate simple foods that might save the lives of starving people. There are several items relief agencies and governments should consider when deciding on the most appropriate foods to prevent starvation in famine situations. During kwashiorkor, intestinal mucous produce grossly defective cells, resulting in considerable lactose malabsorption. Thus, using milk to rehabilitate people, especially children, poses a considerable hazard. High carbohydrate diets to rehabilitate starving people can cause gross edema and fatal congestive heart failure. Generally, clinically apparent vitamin or mineral deficiencies do not occur during famines, because the amount of vitamins or minerals needed to small to maintain a very shrunken body. Yet, when the body demand increases as a result of a rehabilitation diet poor in vitamins and minerals but high in protein or calories, clinical deficiency symptoms emerge, e.g., pellagra in Mozambique. Common food combinations used in relief situations consists of corn, soy, and milk fortified with vitamins and minerals (Bal'ahar mixture, India). Both mixtures require the addition of vegetable oils to make it easier for infants and small children to digest the mixtures.
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PMID:Starvation in the modern world. 845 Aug 73


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