Earlier this year in the University of Arizona's inflammation colloquium we discussed the affects of curcumin on obesity, diabetes and inflammation. Weisberg et al1 concluded that dietary curcumin would positively affect insulin tolerance in mice and thus positively affect diabetes in rats. Mice that were fed curcumin also gained weight despite actually eating more food than the control mice. Curcumin infused diets were also found to increase the presence of adiponectin an anti-inflammatory cytokine. Finally curcumin diets lead to an overall decrease in liver weight, liver steatosis and a decrease in inflammatory hepatic cytokines.
The abstract of this curcumin article seems to indicate that curcumin can be used to treat a variety of diseases related to metabolic syndrome in mouse models. However upon further reading and discussion, our class determined that dosage of curcumin that was administered to these mice was unreasonably high. Therefore it is difficult to extrapolate the results of this study to the human metabolic syndrome.
Recently a lay article was published in the Arizona Daily Star which addressed the turmeric based research of Dr. Janet Funk and Dr. Leslie Ritter at the University of Arizona. This article opens by saying that there are no “preventive treatments for stroke” but that turmeric could “help prevent the third leading cause of death in the United States, stroke.” There are some problems in this lay article. The newspaper article makes a list of untenable arguments based on Turmeric “clinical trials.” These trials are not in fact clinical because they were done on rats. The claims in this article regarding the effectiveness of turmeric are based on these professor’s unpublished results which seems to be a premature way of writing a story. To the author’s credit he did not use any language which explicitly said that turmeric prevents stroke.
The author at the Arizona Daily Star allowed Dr. Funk to describe reperfusion therapy in detail. It was also interesting to learn about Dr. Funk’s rational for using turmeric instead of curcumin. She stated that turmeric “contains essential oils and are better absorbed” in comparison to curcumin. In the future it would be interesting to see if this turmeric stroke study has similar effects as the curcumin metabolic syndrome study. Hopefully Dr. Funk’s team uses a more reasonable amount of turmeric in their studies. Regardless it is difficult to directly compare the two studies because they use different animal models and focus on different diseases. Hopefully Dr. Funk’s turmeric studies find a new treatment for this tragic disease which continues to take the lives of millions of people every year.
Weisberg’s article concerning curcumin’s affects on obesity, diabetes and inflammation
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/pubmed/18403477
New study which examines the relationship between turmeric and stroke
http://azstarnet.com/news/science/article_6b776950-2e1e-56b6-ac9d-aad1bb35ac5c.html
These are very interesting studies. It is too bad the authors at the Arizona Daily Star cannot phrase their articles in a more accurate way. It will be interesting to see if the tumeric trials will make it from animal studies to human stroke studies.
ReplyDeleteYes I agree with your statement. Unfortunately, only the New York Times and other top rate newspapers even have science editors on their staff. For this reason journalists should always send their reports back to the researchers before publication. This way scientific mistakes could be left out of the news article.
ReplyDeleteI work on chemical irritation and I'm always skeptical when I see articles talking about the various health benefits of spices. Most spices activate receptors on pain nerves. Curcumin for example activates TRPV1, which is the same receptor responsible for the burn caused by chili peppers. When these pain nerves are stimulated they release pro-inflammatory chemicals like substance P which cause neurogenic inflammation. Most the time when you see articles about the health benefits of spices they never take into account that one of the main effects of consuming spices will have is an increase in inflammation.
ReplyDelete