Clinical trials are slated for turmeric, the yellow spice common in curries
Margaret Munro
Sun
Turmeric, the bright yellow spice common in curries, appears to have potent medicinal power that could help alleviate cystic fibrosis, a debilitating disease that hits one in every 2,500 Canadian children.
Canadian and U.S. researchers report in the journal Science today that feeding a key component of turmeric, called curcumin, to mice make symptoms of the disease disappear.
While encouraged by the results, the doctors stress more study is needed to find out if curcumin will have the same healing power in people with cystic fibrosis.
“We know that this works in mice, “ says Dr. Michael Caplan at Yale University. “But mice are not people and we don’t know how well these results will translate to people.
“We don’t know what high doses of this stuff will do to people, we don’t know if there are any long-term side-effects and we especially don’t know if this stuff will interact with any of the many medications that CF patients have to take,” he said in an interview.
He also stressed that commercial sources of curcumin can very widely.
“There is no quality control in terms of the composition and what else might be in the preparation,” Caplan said. “So I would encourage people to be patient.”
A clinical trial in humans is slated to start this summer to see if curcumin’s remarkable effect on rodents applies in people with CF, a life-threatening disease in which thick, sticky mucous clogs the lungs and the pancreas. People with CF typically die in their early 30s.
The disease is usually caused by a genetic mutation that causes misfolding of a protein. The protein becomes trapped by the cell’s quality control machinery and does not make it to the surface to perform its normal function.
Caplan and his colleagues at Yale teamed up with Drs. Kai Du and Gergely Lukacs at the University of Toronto to see if curcumin would enable protein to escape the cell’s inner machinery by starving so-called inspector proteins.
They fed curcumin to mice with the CF gene mutation and found that it allowed the protein to function normally in the cells lining the nose and rectum. It also prevented the gastrointestinal problems caused by the disease.
The scientists fed the mice curcumin at doses of 45 mg per kilogram of body weight for three days. Comparable consumption in humans has been shown to have no adverse effects, the scientists note in their paper. People have been eating curcumin in curries for centuries.
While six of the 10 untreated mice in the control group died of intestinal problems within 10 weeks, only one curcumin-treated mouse died. They also found that treating hamster kidney cells with curcumin allowed mutated proteins to reach the cellular membrane.
The researchers say in their Science paper that curcumin and its derivatives represent “promising new candidate compounds” that may prove useful in treatment of CF and other protein-folding diseases.
Turmeric has long been used for medicinal purposes in eastern Asia and recent studies have suggested it can help lower cholesterol and relieve inflammatory bowel disease. Just last week researchers reported that curcumin might also help slow neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
© The Vancouver Sun 2004