Chinese Bean Reduces Life-Threatening Infection Response

Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication of an infection or injury, and occurs when chemicals released into the bloodstream to fight the infection trigger inflammation throughout the body. The result is that organs become damaged, including liver, heart, lungs, kidney, and brain. If excessive damage occurs, it may be irreversible.  In that the nutritional food mung bean (Vigna Radiata) is also used as a traditional Chinese medicine, Shu Zhu, from The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research (New York, USA), and colleagues have revealed that extract of mung bean has the capacity to attenuate the cellular response to HMGB1, a protein involved in sepsis.