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Is Curcumin Contributing To India's Low Rate Of Alzheimer's Disease?
I have a friend who lived for a few months on East 7th Street in Manhattan. One of the things he liked most about living there was the close proximity of a dozen or so Indian restaurants located in his area. Any time he liked, he was only two minutes away from a wonderful Indian meal.
Just one problem: The constant aroma of Indian spices became so overpowering that he finally had to move out. He knew hed had enough when a freshly laundered shirt had a faint smell of curry. As it turns out, if my friend had stayed there and continued to eat frequent Indian meals, he might have helped make his body more resistant to inflammation, free radical damage and perhaps even Alzheimers disease (AD).
Plaque buster
Curcumin is a yellow pigment in the root of turmeric, a herb in the ginger family. Curry gets its distinct colour and flavour from curcumin, which was used by Indian Ayurvedic healers for thousands of years to treat a variety of ailments, including indigestion, jaundice, arthritis, and urinary tract disorders.
In recent years, studies have shown that curcumins antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties may be powerful enough to break up the amyloid plaques in the brain that contribute to Alzheimers disease. The rate of Alzheimers in India (where curcumin is widely consumed) is among the lowest in the world.
The most recent research to examine the effects of curcumin on AD comes from US researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In this study, the UCLA team injected curcumin into ageing mice with advanced amyloid accumulation in the brain. As reported last month in the US Journal of Biological Chemistry, the researchers observed that curcumin was able to cross the blood-brain barrier and bind to beta amyloid. This binding effectively blocked amyloid plaque aggregation . . .
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