Curcumin Alzheimer

Q: Do you have any advice on any foods that can help prevent Alzheimer's disease? Dr. Wright: In addition to low-dose lithium (see Nutrition & Healing August 2003 issue), testosterone for men and estrogen for women (see Nutrition & Healing March 2006 issue), evidence continues to build that regular use of turmeric can significantly lower your risk of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline. Yes, that's turmeric, the bright yellow-orange spice so prominent in Indian and South Asian cooking. You can take turmeric capsules if you want to, but just putting it in your cooking appears to do the job, too. Although it appears that it's a major subfraction of turmeric called curcumin that really has this effect, there's enough curcumin in whole turmeric to make using more expensive "purified" curcumin unnecessary. Curcumin is such a hot research topic that one reporter counted nearly 1,000 research citations on the National Library of Medicine website just between 2000 and 2005. Multiple animal studies have shown that curcumin has very potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and can prevent and reduce beta-amyloid and plaque burden (both found to large excess in Alzheimer's disease) in experimental studies. Of course, researchers always caution that animal research may not translate into the same results in humans, and that there may be unknown health hazards, and so on. While this very cautious approach is very appropriate for patent medications and "space alien" molecules in general, it has much less validity when the item in question has been safely consumed by humans for thousands of years. So if there are enough "clues" that the effect of curcumin demonstrated in animals is true for humans, it's advisable to consider using it even if all the human research isn't complete. And those clues are there. For example, in 2006, researchers reported a study of 1,010 individuals ages 60 - 93 that did not have Alzheimer's or senile dementia. All were given a Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), a standardized test of cognitive function. Individuals who ate curry (a principal component of which is curcumin-containing turmeric) "often or very often" or even "occasionally" had significantly better MMSE scores than did individuals who "never or rarely" consumed curry. That association is enough for me. The potential pay-off of "keeping your marbles" is large, and the risk is so small (just ask generations of South Asians and Indians) that I recommend you frequently use turmeric in your cooking!