The purported bodybuilding supplement vanadium may speed recovery from infection, according to new research.

The findings come from scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are examining how infection recovery can be encouraged and why people with diabetes have lingering symptoms after infections end.

Besides being used by bodybuilders to boost muscle mass, vanadium is also used by some people with diabetes to control blood sugar.

Gregory Freund and colleagues have now found that that diabetic and non-diabetic mice given vanadium—in its vanadyl sulfate form—before pathogen exposure have better recovery that mice that didn't receive the supplement.

The researchers aren't suggesting that people add vanadium supplements to their diet. (For one thing, the supplement can be toxic.) But they say their findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , raise questions about how it works and how it could aid with recovery.

According to a news release :

The amount of vanadium used in the study was comparable to that found in nutritional supplements. While its nutritional value is unclear, the body needs an estimated 10 to 20 micrograms a day and obtains it mostly from plant material. Vanadium in much higher levels becomes toxic. Its use for building muscles has not been confirmed, but vanadium has improved insulin sensitivity and reduced blood sugar in diabetic people.

In their research, [Daniel] Johnson first administered a low dose of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a molecule present on E. coli and other gram-negative bacteria, to both diabetic and non-diabetic mice after they had been given IGF-1. Non-diabetic mice recovered more quickly than diabetic mice, suggesting, he said, an insulin resistance state in the diabetic animals.

Next, experimental mice were pre-treated with vanadyl sulfate before exposure to LPS. Recovery after illness of the vanadium-treated mice, diabetic or not, was 50 percent faster than that of the untreated control mice.

"With vanadyl sulfate being like IGF-1, we expected to see resistance in the diabetic animals, but we didn't see that," Johnson said. "We saw similar improvement. Thus it must have been acting through a different pathway than do IGF-1 or insulin."

Johnson and Freund, also an adjunct professor of animal sciences and a researcher in the immunophysiology and behavior program at Illinois, theorize it may be vanadiums metal-related shape or its ability to inhibit tyrosine phosphatases, which help to modulate signaling proteins, in the immune system. Freund and colleagues last year documented a connection between serine phosphorylation and anti-inflammatory cytokines…

It's possible, Johnson said, that taking vanadyl-sulfate-containing supplements beginning two weeks before possible exposure to gram-negative organisms might help speed recovery from subsequent infection.