Researchers have found that a hormone responsible for controlling iron metabolism may help fight off a severe form of bacterial pneumonia.
The hormone, hepcidin, is produced in the liver and limits the spread of the bacteria by hiding the iron in the blood that the bacteria need to survive and grow.
Stimulating hepcidin production in patients who do not produce it well, such as people with iron overload or liver disease, may help their bodies effectively starve the bacteria to death, suggests the study published online in the journal JCI Insight.
"The rate at which these organisms become resistant to antibiotics is far faster than the rate at which we come up with new antibiotics. It's a race, and they're winning it," said researcher Borna Mehrad from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in the US.
"Increasingly, the choice of antibiotics to treat these infections is more and more limited, and there are occasions where there just isn't an antibiotic to treat with, which is a very scary and dangerous situation," Mehrad said.
Mehrad and his team, including colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that mice that had been genetically modified to lack hepcidin were particularly susceptible to bacterial pneumonia.
Nearly all of the mice had the pneumonia bacteria spread from the lungs into their bloodstream, ultimately killing them.
"It's the exact same thing that happens in people," Mehrad said.
"The mice that lacked the hormone weren't able to hide iron away from the bacteria, and we think that's why the bacteria did so well in the blood," he added.
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