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Review
. 2017 Jun 8;6(2):41.
doi: 10.3390/antiox6020041.

Undernutrition and Overnutrition Burden for Diseases in Developing Countries: The Role of Oxidative Stress Biomarkers to Assess Disease Risk and Interventional Strategies

Francesca Mastorci  1 , Cristina Vassalle  2 , Kyriazoula Chatzianagnostou  3 , Claudio Marabotti  4 , Khawer Siddiqui  5 , Ahmed Ould Eba  6 , Soueid Ahmed Sidi Mhamed  7 , Arun Bandopadhyay  8 , Marco Stefano Nazzaro  9 , Mirko Passera  10 , Alessandro Pingitore  11
Affiliations
Review

Undernutrition and Overnutrition Burden for Diseases in Developing Countries: The Role of Oxidative Stress Biomarkers to Assess Disease Risk and Interventional Strategies

Francesca Mastorci et al. Antioxidants (Basel). .

Abstract

The increased life expectancy, urbanization, and unhealthy lifestyle characterized by a shift towards a sedentary lifestyle and decreased energy expenditure are considered the main drivers of epidemiological transition. In particular, developing countries are facing a double burden caused by coexisting under- and over-nutrition, which causes a change in the disease profile from infectious diseases to a chronic degenerative pattern. This review discusses the under- and over-nutrition context in Mauritania and India, two countries that are experiencing a nutritional transition, and where we began a collaboration with local medical staff to integrate interventional and diagnostic guidelines. If many studies about diet and its relationship to non-communicable diseases are available for India, very few nutrition and cardiovascular risk studies have been conducted in Mauritania. Presently, with the exponential increase of nutrition-related diseases, targeted approaches are needed to provide balanced diets in parallel with the development of national preventive health systems and screening programs adapted to local needs. In this context, the measurement of oxidative stress biomarkers could be promising as an additive tool to assess cardiovascular (CV) risk in general population, and ameliorating prevention in patients at CV risk or with overt CV disease. Moreover, the possibility of improving the outcome by the direct employment of antioxidant remains plausible. Moreover, studies on the content of antioxidant in different foods may be helpful to develop a balanced diet, and achieve the maximal nutritional and functional properties of cultivars with benefits for human health.

Keywords: antioxidants; cardiovascular disease; epidemiological transition; inflammatory biomarkers; non-communicable diseases; nutrition; oxidative stress biomarkers.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Country profiles by World Health Organization 2015–2016 Reports (*) and National Family Health Survey 2015–2016 India Fact Sheet (**). (CVD: cardiovascular disease; NCDs: non-communicable diseases).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Levels of uric acid (UA) in under-, normal-, and over-weight (UW, NW, and OW, respectively) Indian children living in Kolkata.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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