What are the effects of Selenium deficiency on heart failure? Is it possible that adding Selenium to a diet reduces or prevents heart failure?
After completing his Master's in Biomedical Engineering at UT and his PhD in the Molecular Epidemiology Department at Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), Nils Bömer found a job at UMCG in 2016. You can find him in the Department of Experimental Cardiology as an Assistant Professor.
In 2020 and 2024, I received an NWO grant for my research on heart failure, especially on the harmful effects of selenium deficiency. Heart failure, in which the heart struggles to pump enough blood through the body, affects nearly 38,000 Dutch people every year. Low selenium levels in heart failure are associated with reduced quality of life and increased risk of death. My research aims to understand the harmful effects of selenium deficiency.
Good nutrition lowers heart failure rate.
Major culprits for heart failure (as well as obesity) are ultra-processed foods. These products are usually high in fat and sugar but lack essential vitamins and minerals, such as selenium. Selenium protects your cells from damage caused by oxidative stress, which is positive for preventing heart failure.
Picture: Testing in the UMCG lab
Selenium is mainly found in fish, poultry, meat, nuts, and grains. The amount of selenium in these foods depends on the selenium volume in the soil. Crops absorb selenium directly from the soil. The selenium content in grass is also important to generate sufficient selenium in meat products. In the Netherlands, this percentage is relatively low which could be due to the intensive agriculture in our country. In Finland, they have studied what manure enrichment with selenium does for nutrition. So this application of fertilisers could bring great benefits and possibly save lives.
Picture: Self-grown tissue for cell research
Modelling and conducting experiments to develop prevention strategies
During my research, I also want to find out what effect selenium has on heart tissue and how good prevention strategies can be developed. Within my research group, we are modelling which effects supplementation produces using cultured heart muscle cells and pieces of fabricated heart tissue. These models already provide many answers to our questions, but because we are developing the treatment for patients, we also need further tests to see what the systemic effects are, or the interplay between blood and all other organs. You can hardly ask a human to go on a diet that is likely harmful to him. Therefore, in our research, mice are put on a diet low in selenium. This allows us to investigate how organs respond to selenium deficiency and the direct effect on heart tissue within the body. We can also use this model to see if supplementing the deficiency has positive effects. These results help us understand the observational data we have from humans and design future clinical studies on patients. Through our research, we provide evidence to set good guidelines (by the government) for supplement administration and whether patients can live a better life with this medication without ending up in the hospital.
Adjusting the qualification of dietary reference values for selenium
The Health Council advises on dietary reference values in the Netherlands. Among other things, they assess whether the standards - which are scientifically based - are relevant in practice for nutritional information and monitoring. Our research has convinced the Council of the importance of a better understanding of selenium intake and more research on selenium intake in relation to optimal health for all of us.
