The Effect of Flax Seed Cultivars with Differing Content of α-Linolenic Acid and Lignans on Responses to Mental Stress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Phytoestrogens offer a possible alternative to hormone replacement therapy. Flax seed contains large quantities of a phytoestrogen precursor, secoisolariciresinol diglucoside (SDG), as well as large quantities of alpha-linolenic acid; these factors may be protective against vascular disease. We have previously shown that the rise in blood pressure during mental stress is a strong predictor of atherosclerosis progression. METHODS: 35 postmenopausal women with vascular disease, 62 +/- 8 years of age, were treated in a random-sequence double-blind Latin square crossover study comparing three strains of flax seed: Flanders (low in lignan and high in alpha-linolenic acid), Linola 989 (high in lignan and low in alpha-linolenic acid) and AC Linora (intermediate in both lignan and alpha-linolenic acid). RESULTS: Compared to the pre-treatment baseline diet, all three strains of flax significantly reduced blood pressure during mental stress induced by a frustrating cognitive task (Stroop color-word interference task) (p = 0.004). Linola 989, the strain highest in lignan and lowest in alpha-linolenic acid, was associated with the least increase in peripheral resistance during stress, the greatest reduction in plasma cortisol during stress and the smallest increase in plasma fibrinogen during mental stress. CONCLUSION: Flax phytoestrogens ameliorate certain responses to stress and thus may afford protection against atherosclerosis; this hypothesis should be tested in clinical trials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".