Nutrition and Lung Structure and Function

Abstract

Although the effects of malnutrition on various metabolic functions of the body and on disease states have been studied and are well known, the potential influence of nutrition on lung structure and function is not well recognized. Indeed, no human studies related to this subject exist. What little we know comes from experimental animal studies, particularly in rats, dating back to the late 1970s. These studies have revealed that food deprivation influences lung growth and development in growing animals as well as lung structure and function in adults. Due to specific physiologic processes that dominate events during lung growth and adulthood, malnutrition affects these processes differently. In growing animals, food deprivation leads predominantly to the retardation of lung growth and a delay, sometimes nonreversible, in its development into a fully functioning intricate organ. In adult animals, food deprivation alters the architecture of terminal air spaces in a manner similar to what occurs in emphysema.