Glutamine helps heal stomach ulcers

I came across a short article in Life Extension titled "Glutamine helps heal stomach ulcers" and thought it might be useful for dealing with Crohn's inflammation as well. Might be a stretch, but worth a try to add L-Glutamine (perhaps 500-mg per day) to see if there is any benefit.

Here is the text of the article:

In the May, 2009 of the Journal of Nutrition, researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that the amino acid glutamine could help heal the damage caused by H. pylori, the bacteria that causes stomach ulcers and many cases of stomach cancer.

In earlier research, Susan Hagen, PhD and her colleagues discovered that glutamine prevented the death of cultured stomach cells from H. pylori-produced ammonia. For the current experiment, they divided 105 mice to receive standard diets or diets in which L-glutamine replaced 5 percent of total calories. After two weeks, some of the mice in each group were infected with H. pylori. The animals were followed for 20 weeks, during which blood samples were analyzed for antibodies to immune cells that mediate the body’s response to H. Pylori. Additionally, tissue samples were obtained from the stomach and examined for damage, cancer progression and inflammation.

At the end of the 20 week period, infected animals that received L-glutamine had less inflammation than those that received the control diet. "Because many of the stomach pathologies during H. pylori infection are linked to high levels of inflammation, this result provides us with preliminary evidence that glutamine supplementation may be an alternative therapy for reducing the severity of infection," Dr Hagen explained.

"H. pylori bacteria infect more than half of the world's population and were recently identified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization," Dr Hagen added. "Approximately 5.5 percent of the entire global cancer burden is attributed to H. pylori infection and, worldwide, over 900,000 new cases of gastric cancer develop each year. The possibility that an inexpensive, easy-to-use treatment could be used to modify the damaging effects of H. pylori infection warrants further study in clinical trials."