ARDS and linoleic acid

Adult/Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome is topical at the moment. In the comments to the last post I wondered whether omega six fatty acids, especially linoleic acid, might be a driver of ARDS, which is one of the most intractable ITU problems in response to major infection/trauma/inflammatory insults.

Tucker came up with this abstract

Plasma fatty acid changes and increased lipid peroxidation in patients with adult respiratory distress syndrome

and I peeked at the related papers to find this gem:

An increase in serum C18 unsaturated free fatty acids as a predictor of the development of acute respiratory distress syndrome

Again, only an abstract and mostly describing a pilot study. But here is the critical statement:

"Increases in unsaturated serum acyl chain ratios differentiate between healthy and seriously iII patients, and identify those patients likely to develop ARDS".

That is, the more linoleic (and oleic) acid you have as FFAs in your bloodstream, relative to my beloved palmitic acid, the more likely you are to develop ARDS. Which carries a high risk of death.

That was 1996.  The work will have been done before that, so we have known that linoileic acid is bad news for well over 20 years.

If you are a Standard American on the Standard American Diet, or anyone else in the world poisoned by a cardiologist-promoted PUFA based diet, any weight loss through illness will release significant amounts of linoleic acid from your adipocytes. That might just trigger ARDS in the aftermath of a viral pneumonia.

There's a lot of it about.

Peter

BTW Steve Cooksey has a rather nice post up citing a lot of the refs featuring how to maintain an effective innate immune system, so as to avoid the viral pneumonia in the first place. It's a good read.