For those of you that do not know, Resveratrol is an extract taken from grape seed and wine, and is considered to be a potent anti oxidant. One of the lay articles suggested to readers that if they have inflammation, then increasing their grapes/wine consumption may be beneficial. I decided to look into how beneficial reveratrol is as an anti inflammatory, and found some interesting information. I found an article relating the beneficial use of reveratrol to the decrease of symptoms in patients presenting with Colitis.
Article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1038/sj.bjp.0706469/full
Remember that colitis is contributed to neutrophil activation, cytokines, and oxidative stress. According to experts, reveratrol reduces inflammation and ROS. This article wanted to show that resveratrol can help patients with inflammatory problems. The findings concluded that the over the counter supplement corrected morphological problems, reduced pro inflammatory cytokine expression, stimulated apoptosis in colonic cells, and reduced levels of oxidative stress.
There are many other reasons to increase grape, wine, or supplement consumption of resveratrol. Information of this can be found here: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/152308601317203567
Ethan Burns
I found that information to be very interesting so I went and looked up some more info on the compound, and it seems that some studies indicate that the compound is very effective in animal models but less so in humans, still gave results, just not as drastic. Goes to show some of the limitations with animal models, even with their genomic similarities. The article is at http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/phytochemicals/resveratrol/
ReplyDeleteI myself have done a bit of research on Resveratrol when I was writing a composition for the College of Public Health on the use of dietary supplements in skin cancer and prevention.
ReplyDeleteIn skin cancer, Resveratrol acts on selective processes in tumor initiation, promotion and progression and suppresses supplementary angiogenesis and metastasis, and in regards to chemopreventive actions, works as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-mutigen. In vitro studies looked at how Resveratrol induced apoptosis in carcinoma cells, and how it fights oxidative stress by binding to specific polyphenol receptor sites. The in vivo studies looked at the topical and oral treatments and observed how it hindered tumorigenesis and the transformation of benign papillomas to squamous cell carcinomas.
As the comment above mentioned, there is a low in vivo bioavailbility for Resveratrol, and more studies are needed on its effects with humans. It is interesting to see how similar the colitis and skin cancer results on apoptosis, reducing oxidative stress, etc were!
Athar M, Back J, Kim A, et al. Resveratrol: A review of preclinical studies for human cancer prevention.