Eumelanin helps to protect the skin from the harmful effects of the sun. It absorbs and scatters UV radiation, which can cause Infertility, DNA damage& skin cancer. Eumelanin also regulates body temperature. By absorbing and releasing heat, it helps to maintain a stable body temperature.
Due to natural selection, people who lived in areas of intense sunlight developed dark skin coloration to protect against ultraviolet (UV) light, mainly to protect their body from folate depletion. Remember all those old movies where every time you turned around the European female love interest or mother of the hero would die during childbirth? Meanwhile the Eumelanin rich woman from India or Africa or South America or Native American was going off alone to give birth in the wilderness, or water! Eumelanin was the wetnurse in those cases in addition to its well-established safety effect on the lower incidences of neural tube defects, associations have been found between reduced folic acid levels and increased homocysteine concentrations on ,and protective qualities to prevent recurrent spontaneous abortions and other complications of pregnancy. Evolutionary pigmentation of the skin was caused by ultraviolet radiation of the sun to protect the ability of humans to procreate in tropic climes.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. A new study has revealed that a lack in folate causes problems with cell division and DNA replication as well as cohesion. Folate is a vitamin essential to human health. However, because the body can’t store it, it has to be obtained through folate-rich foods or by taking folic acid (man-made folate) supplements. It’s difficult finding a pregnant woman today who doesn’t know folate’s importance in preventing birth defects. A fact perhaps less widely known is that this vitamin (also known as vitamin B9) may also protect against anaemia, infertility, many cancers, psychological disorders and age-associated dementia. However, it’s still unclear to scientists how precisely a deficiency in folate could cause such a wide range of illnesses.
“The problem with folate deficiency is that it affects chromosome maintenance, and once a cell has lost a chromosome or part of it, it can never be fixed. That is, once cell division has gone wrong, you cannot fix it subsequently by consuming a lot of folic acid. Once the damage is done, it is irreversible,” says study author Ying Liu, an associate professor from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine of the Center for Chromosome Stability at project partner University of Copenhagen (the study was posted on the website about threats and possibilities of the future of mankind called "FUTURITY".
The researchers analysed the genetic locus called FRAXA, which contains an extensive repeat sequence of the chemical pattern cytosine-guanine-guanine (CGG). They showed that folate deficiency triggers faulty chromosomal segregation at this locus. Additionally, they found that long-term folate deprivation causes the entire chromosome X to become unstable.
“In the study, we demonstrate that folate deficiency leads to both higher levels of and more harmful chromosome abnormalities than previously known. This causes the daughter cells to inherit the incorrect amount of DNA following cell division or, in some cases, to even lose an entire chromosome. This could explain why folate deficiency is associated with diseases like infertility, mental health disorders, and cancer,”
For the Eu-melanated community folate-deficiency anemia is caused by a lack of folic acid in the diet. Leafy vegetables, citrus fruits, beans, and whole grains are natural sources of folic acid. Folate-deficiency anemia in pregnancy may cause a neural tube defect. This is when the brain or spinal cord doesn't develop normally. The risk of infant death from birth defects overall varies among racial/ethnic groups, but the risk is significantly higher for white infants, followed by Asians, Hispanics, and lastly blacks. When a black infant dies in the hospital it is likely to be due to medical negligence.
When cared for by White physicians, Black newborn babies are about three times more likely to die in the hospital than White newborns, researchers found. That disparity drops significantly when the doctor is Black, although Black newborns nonetheless remained more likely than White newborns to die due to medical negligence. Researchers from George Mason University analyzed data capturing 1.8 million hospital births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 for the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, also known as PNAS.
A report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which covered the period between 2000 to 2017 and was also published and found that Black infants still have more than twice the risk of dying as White infants in hospitals that deliver more Black newborns,” the authors wrote. “The findings revealed that Black physicians outperform their White colleagues when caring for Black newborns.”The authors did not speculate about the reasons behind this, but wrote: “Taken with this work, it gives justification for hospitals and other (predominantly white) care organizations to invest in efforts to reduce such biases and explore their connection to institutional racism.
Eumelanin production increases after birth in melanated people, darkening a baby's skin and providing of protection from the sun's ultraviolet rays – a protection that your baby didn't need in the womb. Your baby's permanent skin tone will likely be fully developed around 6 months. Darker skin colors evolved because they provided increased fitness in early human populations, and protected the cells of the epidermis, or outer layer of the skin, from UV light. This protection extends to all forms of UV light (UVC, UVB, and UVA) as well as blue light. It does this by absorbing the UV light before it's able to damage the sensitive DNA. The biochrome, melanin, is largely responsible for the tinctorial differences that exist in the skin, hair and eyes of man. Its importance for man does not stop there, however. Melanin is necessary, if not essential, for survival; without melanin, man would be required to live under cover or reside in a sunless environment.
Melanin is in all human organs, there are different types of melanin deposited in various internal organs, their function is varied but people with darker complexions have more melanin in their organs! A study on melanin revealed that 'internal melanin' protects against parasites, pollutants, low temperature, oxidative stress, hypoxemia and UV light, and is involved in the development and function of organs.
Neuromelanin (NM) is produced in specific populations of catecholaminergic neurons in the brain think of it as optic fibers making the energy highway for neurons to travel. It appears in greatest quantities in the human brain, in lesser amounts in some other non-human primates, but is absent from the brain in most lower species. All humans have sim- ilar amounts of neuromelanin (brain melanin), and its concentration is independent of skin color; Although deficiency in melanin can lead to several disorders and diseases. People who have too little melanin have a higher risk for hearing problems developmental cognitive ailments even substance abuse predisposition. Parkinson's disease has to do with melanin. Typically, neuromelanin in your brain increases as we age. However, in people with Parkinson's disease, brain cells in their substantia nigra a (key point where melanin connects the brain to the spine) die.
Dark skin also protects people in areas of extreme cold the dark skin of the Inuit people protects the Innuits from the severe UV exposure because of the long daylight hours in winter and high levels of UV reflected from the snow.
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