Safety of long-term dietary supplementation with l-arginine in pigs

Abstract

This study was conducted with a swine model to determine the safety of long-term dietary supplementation with L-arginine-HCl or L-arginine free base. Beginning at 30 days of age, pigs were fed a corn- and soybean meal-based diet (31.5 g/kg body weight/day) supplemented with 0, 1.21, 1.81 or 2.42 % L-arginine-HCl (Experiment 1) or with 0, 1, 1.5 or 2 % L-arginine (Experiment 2). The supplemental doses of 0, 1, 1.5, and 2 % L-arginine provided pigs with 0, 315, 473, and 630 mg L-arginine/kg body weight/day, respectively, which were equivalent to 0, 286, 430, and 573 mg L-arginine/kg body weight/day, respectively, in humans. At 121 days of age (91 days after initiation of supplementation), blood samples were obtained from the jugular vein of pigs at 1 and 4 h after feeding for hematological and clinical chemistry tests. Dietary supplementation with L-arginine increased plasma concentrations of arginine, ornithine, proline, albumin and reticulocytes, while reducing plasma concentrations of ammonia, free fatty acids, triglyceride, cholesterol, and neutrophils. L-Arginine supplementation enhanced protein gain and reduced white-fat deposition in the body. Other variables in standard hematology and clinical chemistry tests, serum concentrations of insulin, growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-I did not differ among all the groups of pigs. These results indicate that dietary supplementation with L-arginine (up to 630 mg/kg body weight/day) is safe in pigs for at least 91 days. Our findings help guide clinical studies to determine the safety of long-term oral administration of L-arginine to humans.

Co-dependence of genotype and dietary protein intake to affect expression on amino acid/peptide transporters in porcine skeletal muscle

“…Further investigation is required to test this hypothesis. The growth and development of pigs involves not only changes in weight and shape, but also alterations in chemical composition and physiological functions Wu et al 2004;Hu et al 2015). In the present study, the mRNA levels of most AA transporters increased with age, such as SNAT2 in LDM, and b 0,+ AT and PepT1 transporters in BFM.…”

Admission levels of asymmetric and symmetric dimethylarginine predict long-term outcome in patients with community-acquired pneumonia

“…One way to reach this goal is L-arginine supplementation. In animal studies, long-term L-arginine supplementation seemed to be safe [35, 36]. In rats it showed an attenuation of angiotensin-II - mediated vasoconstriction [37] but in mice with type 1 diabetes it showed no prevention or reduction of renal injury [38].…”

Dietary supplementation with l-glutamate and l-aspartate alleviates oxidative stress in weaned piglets challenged with hydrogen peroxide

“…The diets were formulated to meet or exceed the nutritional requirements as recommended by the NRC (2012) ( Table 1). The content of Glu and Asp and other amino acids in diets were measured (Table 2), and l-alanine (Ala) (purity >99 %, Beijing Chemclin Biotech, Beijing, China) was used as the isonitrogenous control, as previously described (Hu et al 2015;Kim and Wu 2004;Sun et al 2015). The dosage of H 2 O 2 used in this study was based on our previous study (Yin et al 2015a, b) and the dosages of Glu and Asp supplementation were based on previous works (Kang et al 2015;Yin et al 2015a, b).…”