American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 53, 40-46, Copyright © 1991 by The American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Inc

ORIGINAL RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS

Dietary alpha-linolenic acid and immunocompetence in humans

DS Kelley, LB Branch, JE Love, PC Taylor, YM Rivera and JM Iacono
Western Human Nutrition Research Center, US Department of Agriculture, Presidio of San Francisco, CA 94129.

We examined the effect of dietary alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) on the indices of immunocompetence in 10 healthy free-living men (age 21-37 y) who consumed all meals at the Western Human Nutrition Research Center for 126 d. There was a stabilization period of 14 d at the start when all 10 subjects consumed basal diet (BD) and there were two intervention periods of 56 d each. Five of the subjects consumed the basal diet and the other five consumed flax-seed-oil diet (FD) during each intervention period. Feeding of FD suppressed the proliferation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells when they were cultured with phytohemagglutinin-P (P = 0.041) and concanavalin A (P = 0.054) and the delayed hypersensitivity response to seven recall antigens (NS). Concentrations of immunoglobulins in serum, C3, C4, salivary IgA, the numbers of helper cells, suppressor cells, and total T and B cells in the peripheral blood were not affected by the diets.

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