Curcumin may eliminate Alzheimer’s directly….

Today's Post: Tuesday, 6-9-2009

The original observation was that in India where most people were eating curried foods often, Alzheimer’s disease was rare or at least very much less frequent than in other places. In fact, some of these population studies found that people who only ate curried foods two or three times a week were less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease.

And, in curry, the most common ingredient is the spice turmeric with its distinctive yellow color that contains the active ingredient curcumin.

On this basis many people began taking curcumin or turmeric supplements. When I read that there might well be something to this I began doing so myself.

Last Saturday I got the periodic health news email that the NewsMax people send out that always has 4 or 5 of the current health news stories that their editorial staff thinks important or that they think might be of interest to readers.

The lead story on Saturday, 6-6-2009 was entitled, “Spice of Life Might Help Prevent Alzheimer’s.”

But the story was actually a good bit more exciting. It seems researchers have found evidence that curcumin not only does prevent Alzheimer’s disease, it also was able to remove its cause after it had developed.

The only maybe about it is that they tested this to be so in mice. Not every finding in mice or other nonhuman lab animals tests out as true for humans. But the combination of this new research and the population studies make it look close to certain that it does.

That means that in addition to doing the things that are known to keep your brain active and well supplied with good circulation such as avoiding type 2 diabetes, regular exercise, regular socializing, and learning new things, people can also take a daily curcumin supplement and also avoid Alzheimer’s disease.

And, it makes it look likely that early stage Alzheimer’s disease might be reversed by taking curcumin -- although the amount might be greater than required for prevention.

The apparent cause of Alzheimer’s disease is the damage to brain neurons from a build up of amyloid plaques. These amyloid plaques prevent communication between neurons so they become useless or kill the neurons or both.

It seems that at researchers at Duke in the Duke University Medical Center used some mice that had been genetically modified to reliably develop these plaques.

But when they fed curcumin to these genetically vulnerable mice from a young age, virtually no plaques developed. But even more exciting was when they fed high doses of curcumin to other mice that had already developed these amyloid plaques, the plaques gradually disappeared.

In addition, to be sure these findings work in people, the story reported that a human clinical trial is now being done in California.

The other reason to take curcumin or eat curried foods containing it is that the incidence of all cancers is also lower in India than elsewhere.

This may be due to different environmental factors such as what has been much lower use of herbicides and pesticides in India. But the NewsMax article ending by saying that turmeric and curcumin are also being studied to see if they also help prevent cancer as well as Alzheimer’s disease.

And, it added something I had not yet heard, that turmeric and curcumin are also being studied to see if they might help prevent arthritis.