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One more reason to eat your vegetables



Scarfing down broccoli in elephantine portions doesn’t sound like the best way to treat radiation exposure. However, recent research has isolated a compound found in broccoli and other so called cruciferous vegetables which may do just that. The molecule looks like this
and is called 3,3’-diindolylmethane, or DIM for short. In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences scientists treated rats that had undergone total body irradiation with doses of DIM and observed increased survival rates compared to rats that had not received the treatment. While administering DIM before total body irradiation required a smaller dose to elicit the same effect, administering DIM after total body irradiation also resulted in better survival rates for the rats. You can imagine that this treatment could be useful in many situations, like to help chemotherapy patients recover more quickly or to treat people who have been accidentally exposed to radiation. How does it work, you say?

As I’m sure you know getting exposed to high amounts of radiation is BAD. It causes lots of uncomfortable side effects like nausea, infertility and organ failure. Luckily these side effects don’t last long because chances are you will die quite soon after exposure.

Radiation has such a strong effect on our bodies because it damages the core of our existence: our DNA. A cell with bad DNA will have problems carrying out normal functions like regulating cell growth and making proteins. Since our overall health relies heavily on carefully timed molecular events, misregulation is the source of all those side effects and eventually, death. 

While a high enough dose of radiation will most certainly kill you, a lower dose will elicit a sort of emergency response in any affected cells. This response isn’t like an ambulance coming to take you to the ER though, it is the activation of signaling pathways that tell your cells that something is terribly wrong. 

The authors of the aforementioned paper think DIM works by activating ATM, a protein that is responsible for sounding the DANGER: DAMAGED DNA alarm in our cells.  Addition of DIM to damaged cells increased the activity of ATM, which in turn increased what the authors call the DNA damage response. This response includes putting broken DNA strands back together, preventing cell death, and stimulating the production of antioxidants.

The scientists of the PNAS paper hope to see DIM used as a pre- and/or post- treatment for total body irradiation and their work has shown some promising results. However since DIM has only been tested in rats, it is still a ways off from being available as a drug. So for now, just eat your vegetables and rest assured you will bode well should we find ourselves in an apocalyptic nuclear war.

Sources and further reading:
J.W. Fahey, Y. Zhang & P. Talalay (1997) Broccoli sprouts: An exceptionally rich source of inducers of enzymes that protect against chemical carcinogens. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 94, pp 10367-10372.

S. Fan et al. (2013) DIM (3,3’-diindolylmethane) confers protection against ionizing radiation by a unique mechanism. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Early edition. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1308206110

D. Liska (1998) The Detoxification Enzyme Systems. Alternative Medicine Review, 3(3), pp 187-198.
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Comments

  1. Anne MNovember 11, 2013 at 9:30 AM

    Well, we might not survive an apocalyptic war, but maybe we could survive our local nuclear power plant releasing too much bad stuff.

    ReplyDelete

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