- Title
- Diverse characteristics of the urinary excretion of amino acids in humans and the use of amino acid supplementation to reduce fatigue and sub-health in adults
- Creator
- Dunstan, R. H.; Sparkes, D. L.; Macdonald, M. M.; De Jonge, X. Janse; Dascombe, B. J.; Gottfries, J.; Gottfries, C.-G.; Roberts, T. K.
- Relation
- Nutrition Journal Vol. 16, no. 19
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12937-017-0240-y
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- Background: The excretion of amino acids in urine represents an important avenue for the loss of key nutrients. Some amino acids such as glycine and histidine are lost in higher abundance than others. These two amino acids perform important physiological functions and are required for the synthesis of key proteins such as haemoglobin and collagen. Methods: Stage 1 of this study involved healthy subjects (n = 151) who provided first of the morning urine samples and completed symptom questionnaires. Urine was analysed for amino acid composition by gas chromatography. Stage 2 involved a subset of the initial cohort (n = 37) who completed a 30 day trial of an amino acid supplement and subsequent symptom profile evaluation. Results: Analyses of urinary amino acid profiles revealed that three groups could be objectively defined from the 151 participants using k-means clustering. The amino acid profiles were significantly different between each of the clusters (Wilks’ Lambda = 0.13, p < 0.0001). Cluster 1 had the highest loss of amino acids with histidine being the most abundant component. Cluster 2 had glycine present as the most abundant urinary amino acid and cluster 3 had equivalent abundances of glycine and histidine. Strong associations were observed between urinary proline concentrations and fatigue/pain scores (r = .56 to .83) for females in cluster 1, with several other differential sets of associations observed for the other clusters. Conclusions: Different phenotypic subsets exist in the population based on amino acid excretion characteristics found in urine. Provision of the supplement resulted in significant improvements in reported fatigue and sleep for 81% of the trial cohort with all females reporting improvements in fatigue. Trial registration: The study was registered on the 18th April 2011 with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12611000403932).
- Subject
- sub-health; fatigue; amino acids; nutritional supplement; collagen turnover; urine
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1399583
- Identifier
- uon:34640
- Identifier
- ISSN:1475-2891
- Rights
- © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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