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Glutamate news
MSG and asthma - what is the evidence?
WOODS, R. K. Department of Epidemiology &
Preventive Medicine, Monash University
The flavour enhancer, monosodium glutamate
(MSG) was first implicated in causing adverse reactions in 1968, when Dr. Kwok
wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine explaining how he felt
after eating in a Chinese restaurant. A possible association between MSG and
asthma was also first proposed in a letter, to the New England Journal of
Medicine, from Alien & Baker in 1981. Since this time six clinical trials,
to determine the relationship between MSG and asthma, have been conducted
throughout the world and published. Two of these trials have shown an
association between MSG and asthma (14 of 62 subjects were defined as having
MSG-induced asthma in one study, and 2 of 30 in the other). However four trials,
involving 45 subjects with a positive history of MSG-induced asthma, have shown
no such association. A further trial, which assessed a range of food chemicals
in adults with asthma, demonstrated MSG-induced asthma in one out of the eight
subjects studied. Attempts to clarify this issue have been limited due to
methodological deficiencies, including the small number of subjects studied,
inadequate blinding procedures, inappropriate withdrawal of asthma medications,
poor dietary control and the use of effort-dependent measures of lung function.
Recent reviews of the relationship between MSG and asthma have concluded that a
causal connection between MSG and asthma has not been conclusively established.
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