Turmeric Fights Alzheimer's, Study
Curcumin is a natural product in turmeric, an interesting part of your spice garden. It is also a wonder drug that treats Alzheimer's disease. A recent study shows that a close chemical analog of curcumin may make it a useful treatment for the brain disease, according to sciencedaily.com.
"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 a study that has been published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
"Accumulation and aggregation of protein fragments, known as beta-amyloid, drives the irreversible loss of neurons in Alzheimer's disease," according to news.vanderbilt.edu.
To bring down the accumulation and eliminate this demolition, tiny molecules have to be developed. However, the ability of these molecules to cross the blood-brain barrier has prevented the drug from entering the brain.
An interesting strategy has been devised to deliver a molecule just like curcumin effectively to the brain by Pham and colleagues at Shiga University of Medical Science in Otsu, Japan. In order to give the drug intravenously, the researchers have developed an atomizer that would develop a curcumin aerosol. They created a molecule similar to curcumin, FMeC1, which was the one actually used in this study.
Phame said that the plus point of the FMeC1 is that it is a perfluoro compound, which can be tracked by the biodistribution in the brain noninvasively, with the help of magnetic resonance imaging. As the curcumin is a "very simple chemical structure", it does not cost too much to generate the analog, explained Pham.
He added that in this manner, the drug can be breathed in and reach the brain. He also pointed out that the relevant nebulizers are already out in the market, 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.
