A chemical found in seafood may cause kidney damage – even in amounts considered safe for human consumption, a new study in mice has revealed.
In light of these findings, researchers are calling for more regulation of the neurotoxin, domoic acid, hoping that officials will reconsider how much is safe to eat.
Produced by algae in the world’s oceans, domoic acid is a natural toxin that accumulates in bottom feeders such as mussels, clams and scallops. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) currently limits the amount of domoic acid that can be consumed by humans, since the chemical is already known to cause brain damage at high concentrations – a condition known as amnesic shellfish poisoning.
But recently, the neurotoxin is becoming more prominent in coastal regions – likely due to environmental reasons – causing it to show up more frequently in larger sea creatures, such as fish and even dolphins. According to the study author P. Darwin Bell, the researchers were interested in reexamining domoic acid based on a fellow colleague’s research of the chemical in relation to sea lions.
“The sea lions get a disease that causes them to have neurological symptoms and actually causes death,” Bell, of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, told FoxNews.com.
Hoping to look further into domoic acid’s effects on the kidneys, Bell and his colleague Jason Funk set up a series of experiments in mice, analyzing how consumption of the chemical affected the rodents’ kidney health. They found that the domoic acid very quickly damaged the mice’s kidneys, even at very low concentrations.
“We looked further at lower and lower concentrations of domoic acid, and it actually caused kidney damage at a hundred times lower than what causes injury in the brain,” Bell said. “The FDA sets the limit of domoic acid that can be consumed by humans at 20 parts per million (ppm)… The government says below this it doesn’t cause any neurologic affects, but the kidney is affected at a hundred times lower than this concentration.”
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