Study shows that curcumin fights Alzheimer’s
We have seen how it is as effective as many commonly prescribed drugs.
Now, a study from Vanderbilt shows that curcumin fights Alzheimer’s.
Curcumin is the active ingredient in turmeric, and is responsible for many of the benefits of turmeric. Researchers believe that curcumin fights Alzheimer’s.
“Curcumin has demonstrated ability to enter the brain, bind and destroy the beta-amyloid plaques present in Alzheimer’s with reduced toxicity,” said Wellington Pham, Ph.D., assistant professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt and senior author of the study.
Proteins called beta-amyloid build up and cause the loss of neurons in Alzheimer’s. Developing drugs for Alzheimer’s has been very challenging, as the drugs are restricted by the blood-brain barrier.
Pham and his research team at Shiga University in Japan developed a new strategy to drive curcumin more effectively to the brain. It is believed that curcumin fights Alzheimer’s.
“One of the difficulties in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease is how to deliver drugs across the blood brain barrier,” Pham said. “Our body has designed this barrier to protect the brain from any toxic molecules that can cross into the brain and harm neurons. But it is also a natural barrier for molecules designed for disease-modifying therapy,” he added.
To work around this restriction, the team devised a way to deliver curcumin to the brain through inhalation.
“The advantage of the FMeC1 is that it is a perfluoro compound, which can be tracked by the biodistribution in the brain noninvasively using magnetic resonance imaging. Curcumin is a very simple chemical structure, so it is not expensive to generate the analog,” Pham explained. “In this way the drug can be breathed in and delivered to the brain,” he said, noting that nebulizers are out in the market already, and are relatively inexpensive.
“In this paper we also showed that delivery to the cortex and hippocampal areas is more efficient using aerosolized curcumin than intravenous injection in a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease,” Pham said.
This study showing that curcumin fights Alzheimer’s was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s.
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REFERENCES:
1. “Curcumin’s Ability to Fight Alzheimer’s Studied.” Vanderbilt Research. Vanderbilt Research, 8 Jan. 2015. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.
2. “Curcumin’s Ability to Fight Alzheimer’s Studied.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 Jan. 2015. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.
