Credit: Sarah Bird, Michigan Tech
Vitamins in tears could provide alternatives to
blood-based nutritional health screenings.
Newswise, January 14, 2017 — Babies cry easily, but those tears may help shed
light on the role and potential uses of vitamins in tears. Maryam Khaksari, a
research specialist at the Chemical Advanced Resolution Methods (ChARM)
Laboratory at Michigan Tech, is the lead author of a paper on the subject
recently published in Experimental Eye Research.
"Our goal was to seek the viability of establishing
measurable units of tears for nutritional assessments,” Khaksari says.
"Your body cannot manufacture vitamins, and vitamins reflect available
food sources in your body. That's what makes them good indicators of nutritional
health."
The researchers are working towards inexpensive, tear-based
microfluidic devices or strips to improve access to nutritional tests,
especially for at-risk populations.
As the authors write, nutritional deficiencies are most often treated by symptoms, "however, symptom-presentation substantially lags behind the chemical level deficiency."
In children that damage can have lifelong effects, which is
part of the reason Khaksari collaborated with a medical and analysis at UP
Health System – Portage and Michigan Tech.
They focused on babies with a 100 percent liquid diet of
formula or breastmilk to understand the connection between parent nutrition and
infant nutrition. Also, nutritional data gleaned from the parents help reveal
the family's access to healthy foods.
They tested tear samples and blood samples from 15
four-month-old infants and their parents. In general, water-soluble vitamins
were higher in infants and fat-soluble vitamins were higher in parents—notably,
mothers tended to be more deficient across the board.
Generally, there is a connection between parents and babies
and the team showed a correlation between vitamins E and B. Formula-fed babies
were the exception, with notably higher levels of B vitamins. The work is
preliminary but shows promise for laying out trends in tear vitamin levels.
"Since tears contain vitamins," she says, "they
might have real potential to replace other clinical tests."
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