Abstract
The intestinal barrier plays a crucial role in maintaining gut health, and an increased permeability has been linked to several intestinal and extra-intestinal disorders. There is an increasing demand for interventions aimed at strengthening this barrier and for in vivo challenge models to assess their efficiency. This study investigated the effect of sauna-induced dehydration on intestinal barrier function (clinicaltrials.gov: NCT03620825). Twenty healthy subjects underwent three conditions in random order: (1) Sauna dehydration (loss of 3% body weight), (2) non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) intake, (3) negative control. Intestinal permeability was assessed by a multi-sugar urinary recovery test, while intestinal damage, bacterial translocation and cytokines were assessed by plasma markers. The sauna dehydration protocol resulted in an increase in gastroduodenal and small intestinal permeability. Presumably, this increase occurred without substantial damage to the enterocytes as plasma intestinal fatty acid-binding protein (I-FABP) and liver fatty acid-binding protein (L-FABP) were not affected. In addition, we observed significant increases in levels of lipopolysaccharide-binding protein (LBP), IL-6 and IL-8, while sCD14, IL-10, IFN-ɣ and TNF-α were not affected. These results suggest that sauna dehydration increased intestinal permeability and could be applied as a new physiological in vivo challenge model for intestinal barrier function.
Highlights
The intestinal barrier plays a crucial role in maintaining gut health, and an increased permeability has been linked to several intestinal and extra-intestinal disorders
We showed that the combination of heat and dehydration at rest as part of a sauna protocol resulted in an increased small intestinal permeability, assessed by the L/R ratio, in healthy subjects
This increase occurred without substantial damage to the enterocytes as plasma intestinal fatty acid-binding protein (I-FABP) and liver fatty acid-binding protein (L-FABP) were not affected
Summary
The intestinal barrier plays a crucial role in maintaining gut health, and an increased permeability has been linked to several intestinal and extra-intestinal disorders. We observed significant increases in levels of lipopolysaccharide-binding protein (LBP), IL-6 and IL-8, while sCD14, IL-10, IFN-ɣ and TNF-α were not affected These results suggest that sauna dehydration increased intestinal permeability and could be applied as a new physiological in vivo challenge model for intestinal barrier function. The combination of these two factors might be sufficient to induce intestinal permeability and serve as a potential new model to challenge the intestinal barrier function even in untrained individuals It was the aim of this study to explore the effect of heat-induced dehydration at rest on small and large intestinal barrier function. For this purpose, we applied a sauna dehydration protocol. The larger sugar molecules, such as lactulose and sucralose can only cross the intestinal barrier by paracellular passage and are not taken up a ctively[17]
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