Nocturia, Aquaporins, and Oxytocin

[2020-7-13]

Someone posted about nocturia on HealthUnlocked's Parkinson's Movement forum and I replied with the  following (I don't think I can keep up with doing the reference properly, perhaps if it starts to really bother me I will edit):

Apart from prostate and autonomic nervous system problems, one issue in aging related to nocturia might be loss of function of aquaporins. Aquaporins are membrane channels for water; though water can diffuse across cell membranes AQPs move water faster and are particularly important under stress conditions. AQP function declines with age and could contribute to many age-related health issues including reduction in blood brain barrier function.

hindawi.com/journals/omcl/2...

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

Oxytocin has some vassopressin-like activity and helps move AQP from inside the cell to the membrane surface when needed.

jasn.asnjournals.org/conten...

Oxytocin levels decline with age:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

The probiotic Lactobacillus reuteri increases oxytocin production:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

Though oxytocin is promoted in some popular health sources as being 'the love hormone' and a panacea -  more is not always better. It can actually increase anxiety in females in some situations:

sciencedaily.com/releases/2...

Oxytocin can also cause uterine contractions and my own experience with L. reuteri is that it caused labor-pain level menstrual cramps (I'm not exaggerating - it was that bad) - so it is not for everyone.

That said, I think L. reuteri might be worth trying for men and post-menopausal women [or perhaps not women at all; wilderness voice wrote an excellent post, "Women Ill-Served By Exclusion From Pain Studies", which discusses oxytocin's hyperalgesic effect on women)]. L. reuteri is found in a number of products; the one that caused my cramps was Lifeway BioKefir Digestion (vanilla flavor).

~

Another supporting reference on nocturia / nocturnal polyuria:

https://www.goldjournal.net/article/S0090-4295(19)30683-1/fulltext

~

Recently watched a talk on aquaporins by Dr. Peter Agre:

https://youtu.be/L1TyWo86w4Q

I don't expect to do a full index on it but before my memory fades I would like to add time-stamped comments on certain sections, particularly the part on interactions with heavy metals (arsenic).

~

I can't help but think that some of the benefit of eating plant foods is that there may be some factor(s) present that regulates aquaporin function. While I believe that aquaporins are very important to animal physiology, some would argue against that since mutations in humans in AQPs don't produce severely pathological phenotypes. (I think there may be something amiss here ...). Plants, however, are very dependent on AQP function. Typical classes of plant natural products that are often produced in stress response (e.g., polyphenols) would be the obvious place to look, but now there is research on plant microRNAs which have been found to enter the mammalian bloodstream after ingestion of plants and  have the potential to exert biochemical and physiological effects.

https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12986-018-0305-8

~

It would be nice to find a graph on oxytocin vs. age for humans. Why is it so hard to find such information?






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