Adding small amounts of powdered ginger to food may help take the edge off seasonal allergy symptoms, according to an animal study published online in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. Daily intake of dried ginger significantly reduced sneezing and other signs of allergy in rodents with induced allergic rhinitis, or hay fever.

A major component in ginger, 6-gingerol, suppresses the activation of T lymphocytes, or T cells, a type of white blood cell that plays an important role in sensitizing people to specific allergens, the researchers said.

Ginger is a popular spice produced from the root of the ginger plant, Zingiber officinale. Some herbal remedies for nausea and other ailments also contain ginger.

Experiments in Japan involved mice fed a normal diet containing 2 percent powdered ginger or a control diet without ginger. After two weeks on the diets, the ginger-fed mice received two injections of purified egg proteins called ovalbumin (OVA) to stimulate allergic rhinitis symptoms. Control mice received either OVA or placebo injections.

The mice underwent an immune challenge two weeks later in which a small amount of OVA was inserted into the nose. Allergic symptoms, such as sneezing and nasal rubbing, were counted for the next 10 minutes.

Mice in the ginger-fed group sneezed 2.1 times each, on average. This compares with 15.2 sneezes per mouse in the OVA-injected controls and roughly one sneeze in the placebo-injected animals. Fewer nasal rubbing movements were recorded in the ginger-fed mice compared with OVA-injected controls, but not the placebo group.

Children who eat certain types of fish may be less likely to develop nasal allergies, according to a study from Sweden.

Researchers studied what children ate at age eight and then monitored whether they developed nasal inflammation due to allergies or colds by age 16. Regular consumption of oily fish like salmon was linked a reduced risk of allergic rhinitis, or inflammation of the mucus membrane inside nasal passages.

While it's possible that fish consumption may help prevent the development of rhinitis, a healthy diet complete with a variety of items from all food groups may have a similar effect in promoting general wellbeing, said Diana Di Fabio, a pediatric dietician at Cleveland Clinic Children's in Ohio.

"Fish consumption at eight years old may simply serve as an indicator of high dietary quality," Di Fabio, who wasn't involved in the study.

"Children who are picky eaters may avoid foods high in omega-3 polyunsaturated fats including fish and seafood, walnuts, spinach and soybeans," she added. "Similarly, children who are more likely to consume those foods may also have a more adventurous palate and be more likely to consume a balanced diet."

Rhinitis is one of the most common chronic diseases in childhood, note lead study author Jessica Magnusson, a nutritionist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and colleagues in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

At the start of the study, parents and kids completed questionnaires detailing how often the children consumed 98 foods and beverages common in Sweden. For fish, they were asked specifically about oily varieties such as herring, mackerel and salmon, as well as less oily alternatives like codfish, Pollock, pike, tuna and fish fingers.

They also asked parents if kids had symptoms of rhinitis, such as sneezing or runny nose or eye symptoms in contact with furry pets or pollens after age four, and 19 percent of the children did.

Among the 1,590 children who didn't have rhinitis symptoms at age eight, 21 percent of them developed allergic rhinitis and 15 percent developed non-allergic rhinitis by age 16.

Total fish consumption didn't appear related to the development of rhinitis between the ages of 8 and 16. Nor did fish fingers, or the less-oily options like tuna and cod.

But eating oily fish was linked to a drop in risk of allergic rhinitis by roughly half. It was also tied to lowered risk of non-allergic rhinitis but not enough to rule out the possibility that the reduction was due to chance.

It's possible that fish consumption during infancy, or how much fish mothers ate during pregnancy might have influenced the odds that children developed rhinitis later in life, the researchers acknowledge, and they didn't measure these things in their study.

"Since we don't eat single nutrients, the take-home message is one that people hear all the time: eat more plants, less animals," Samantha Heller, a nutritionist at New York University's Center for Musculoskeletal Care and Sports Performance who wasn't involved in the study.

Researchers have discovered a protein that may slow the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), thereby revealing a target for developing natural therapies against the deadly virus.

"In earlier studies, we knew that we could interfere with the spread of HIV-1, but we couldn`t identify the mechanism that was stopping the process," said study co-author Yong-Hui Zheng, associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University in the US.

The researchers found that the protein ERManI prevents the HIV virus from replicating.

"We now know that ERManI is an essential key, and that it has the potential as a antiretroviral treatment," Zheng noted.

Currently, there is no cure for HIV-1. Once patients have it, they have it for life. While there are antiretroviral therapies available, they can only prolong life, albeit dramatically, but they cannot cure the disease.

Current drug treatments have to be taken for a lifetime, which causes side effects and many other issues, Zheng said.

"We see a way to treat this disease by helping the body protect itself," he noted.

While it could be decades before an ERManI-based treatment can be prescribed for HIV-1 patients, these results provide a strong path for future research involving human cells, and later, clinical tests.

The next steps will be to test if HIV resistance can be promoted by increasing ERManI levels, Zheng pointed out.

The findings were detailed in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

An analysis of 21 studies has shown that exposure to pesticides is associated with increased risk of developing diabetes by 61 percent, with different types of pesticides showing varying levels of risk.

How diabetes develops is considered to be interplay between genetic and environmental factors. Emerging evidence suggests that environmental contaminants, including pesticides may play an important role in the pathogenesis of diabetes.

In this study by Giorgos Ntritsos, University of Ioannina, Greece, and Ioanna Tzoulaki and Evangelos Evangelou, Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues, the researchers performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies that assessed the association between exposure to pesticides and diabetes.

The association between exposure to any pesticide and all types of diabetes was examined. Separate analyses for studies that looked only at type 2 diabetes (T2D) participants were performed.

The authors concluded that this systematic review supports the hypothesis that exposure to various types of pesticides increases the risk of diabetes. Subgroup analyses did not reveal any differences in the risk estimates based on the type of studies or the measurement of the exposure.

They noted that analysing each pesticide separately suggests that some pesticides are more likely to contribute to the development of diabetes than others.

The study is presented at the meeting the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD).

Researchers have recently connected the molecular dots between Periodontitis and heart disease.

Periodontitis is a risk factor for heart disease. Now, the team has shown that a periodontal pathogen causes changes in gene expression that boost inflammation and atherosclerosis in aortic smooth muscle cells.

The circumstantial evidence that led to this study was ample. The periodontal pathogen, Porphyromonas gingivalis, has also been found in coronary artery plaques of heart attack patients. And in two species of animal models, P. gingivalis has been shown to cause and accelerate formation of coronary and aortic atherosclerosis.

The investigators, led by Torbjorn Bengtsson of the Department of Clinical Medicine, School of Health Sciences, orebro University, orebro, Sweden, showed how this happens.

They began by culturing human aortic smooth muscle cells, and infecting them with P. gingivalis. They found that gingipains, virulence factors produced by P. gingivalis, boost expression of the pro-inflammatory angiopoietin 2, while dampening expression of the anti-inflammatory angiopoietin 1 in the smooth muscle cells, with the net effect of increasing inflammation. Inflammation is strongly implicated in atherosclerosis.

Although unstimulated [aortic smooth muscle cells] produce angiopoietin 2 at a low level, stimulation with wild-type P. gingivalis dramatically increases the gene expression of angiopoietin 2 in [aortic smooth muscle cells], the investigators wrote.

First author Boxi Zhang said that the research clarifies the mechanism behind the association of periodontitis and cardiovascular disease, adding that their aim is to find biomarkers that can help us diagnose and treat both diseases.

The research is published ahead of print in Infection and Immunity.