London : Replacing glucose with rice powder in the oral rehydration therapy for cholera can reduce toxicity by almost 75 per cent, a new study has found, reports PTI.
The main treatment for cholera involves oral rehydration therapy where the patient drinks water mixed with salts and glucose.
Although proven to be enormously effective, there are concerns that the glucose content might actually worsen the disease, researchers said.
Scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland have shown that glucose increases the toxicity of the cholera bacterium, whereas replacing glucose with starch can reduce its toxicity by almost 75 per cent.
The usual treatment for cholera involves feeding the patient water mixed with electrolyte salts and glucose. The idea is to replace the patient’s lost fluids and essential salts, while the glucose acts as a source of carbon and helps the intestine to absorb the salts more efficiently.
The patient continues the therapy until the infection has ran its course. Up to half of cholera patients would die without treatment, but oral rehydration therapy has been shown to lower the deaths to around 1 per cent, ‘Medicalxpress’ reported.
However, there are concerns that using glucose in the rehydration mixture can actually exacerbate the disease.
The problem is that the infecting bacterium also consumes glucose, and that increases the expression of its genes that make it toxic.
Melanie Blokesch and Andrea Rinaldo at EPFL correlated data from a recent cholera outbreak in Haiti with the effectiveness of oral rehydration therapy. Blokesch’s lab grew the cholera bacterium with different sugars (eg glucose, sucrose) and starch from potatoes and rice to see how each would affect the cholera toxin genes.
Scientists found that both the activity of the genes, as well as the production of the cholera toxin itself were increased when the bacterium was fed with glucose, but they were considerably decreased when it was fed with starch from rice.
The research was published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
