Grapefruit May Help Nature Score One More

When you contract a disease that starts out without anything much in the way of symptoms only to later become chronic and destructive to boot, you’ve obviously got a serious problem on your hands. Hepatitis C is just such a disease. It’s sneaky. Up to about 6 months nothing much seems to happen. Even after that, when the disease has entered its chronic stage, there may be no real evidence that anything much is taking place. In spite of this, the virus is quietly damaging the liver due to inflammation. It’s a slow progression, but the end result may be scarring of the liver and even advanced scarring similar to that seen in long-term alcoholics, which we know as cirrhosis. In the end, the liver might fail and even succumb to cancer.

Virus caused disease is usually hard enough to treat, especially when it possesses, as with hepatitis C, such a sinister nature that infected individuals may not report having symptoms until damage has already occurred. Unfortunately, no vaccine exists for hepatitis C. On the other hand, many patients can be cleared of the virus by giving a course of anti-viral medicines. So, why look for other ways of treating? The downside is that many patients develop really annoying side effects from the powerful medications required.

Current treatment is a combination of pegylated interferon-alpha-2a and the antiviral drug ribavirin for a period of 24 to as much as 48 weeks. Cure rates vary from about 50 to 75% or even better.The treatment may be physically demanding, particularly for those with a prior history of drug or alcohol abuse. A substantial proportion of patients will experience all kinds of side effects ranging from a “flu-like” syndrome to severe adverse effects including anemia, cardiovascular events and psychiatric problems such as suicide or thoughts of suicide.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens when powerful medications are used. Sometimes the cure seems to be worse than the disease. So we must keep searching for new therapeutic approaches, and the best way to do this is to learn more about how the disease mechanisms operate. In the case of hepatitis C it was noted that secretion of the virus depends on an association with the formation of very low-density lipoprotein. With this in mind, researchers decided to try seeing what effect substances known to influence assembly and secretion of lipoproteins might have on infected cells. They hit pay dirt when they tried a flavonoid named naringenin found in grapefruit. The compound actually reduced the ability of the secreted virus to infect healthy cells by 79%.

After investigating further what was happening they concluded that the hepatitis C virus was “hitching a ride” on the lipoprotein-cholesterol life cycle. The naringenin compound was apparently able to disrupt this cosy arrangement by significantly inhibiting the secretion of the virus’s core protein as well as RNA when provided at a specific dose. If put to practical use by adding the naringenin to the patient’s diet, a new, considerably less troublesome treatment could probably be developed.

However, it seems that every good result invariably possesses some sort of drawback. In this case the hitch is found in the fact that the naringenin compound is poorly absorbed by the intestines. In effect, patients would probably be forced to inject themselves with it to achieve a salutary result. Sounds reasonable to me; all things considered. Anyone object to my line of thinking? Hey! – It’s only an opinion.