Ayurvedic medicine is a traditional complimentary and alternative practice of medicine in India. It has long included the use of boswellia for the treatment of arthritis. Current promising results in patients with ulcerative colitis, asthma, and IBD have lead to study a semisynthetic form of a component boswellia called acetyl-11-keto-beta-boswellic acid (sAKBA). The synthetic AKBA’s allowed to better study the mechanisms and effectiveness of its therapeutic application.
One of the major mechanisms studied is the recruitment of inflammatory cells to areas such as the colonic venules. It was found that there is a significant hindrance of leukocyte-endothelial cell adhesion and thus is believed to be mediated by P-selectin. The suppression of inflammation found with sAKBA was comparable to that of dexamethasone which is a commonly used steroid for IBD and is believed to prevent the upregulation of P-selectin and thus prevent the recruitment of leukocytes and platelets.
Due to the same effectiveness of sAKBA and dexamethasone, boswellic acids are a promising alternative to traditional steroidal therapy. It is known that cortisolDue to many of their major side effects steroids cannot be used for chronic treatment and thus using boswellic acids may be a more effective and promising treatment for inflammatory diseases.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16423918
Thanks Jason for posting this information on boswellic acids. If these are indeed effective in treatment that could mean that individuals with IBD, asthma, and ulcerative collitis have some hope in relieving the pain in their diseases. Your post gave me a bit of curiosity and I looked up ayurvedic medicine. I particularly found this portion interesting since there is a large following and its development of a philosophy for the people is also interesting.
ReplyDeleteI think many people with chronic inflammatory diseases would greatly benefit from treatments that don't have severe side-effects, such as immunosuppression. This would provide a greater benefit to the patient. I'm curious as to whether we'll be seeing any possible therapies that use more alternative methods in the future to treat inflammatory diseases.
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