It is quite possible that scarfing down some Indian food could actually strengthen your immune system! Turmeric is a Indian curry spice in which its orange-yellow coloring comes from curcumin. As it is most often known to be an antiinflammatory agent, curcumin has recently proven to be an agent that varies activation of T cells, B cells, macrophages, neutrophils, natural killer cells, and dendritic cells. Curcumin downregulates the expression of several proinflammatory cytokines such as TNF, IL-1, IL-2, IL-6, IL-8, IL-12, along with chemokines, through the inactivation of the transcription factor NF-kB. In low doses curcumin can also increase antibody responses. Reportedly curcumin has been beneficial in treating patients with arthritis, allergies, asthma, atherosclerosis, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and cancer maybe from its regulatory effect on the immune system.
Turmeric is actually the rhizome powder from a certain herb in the ginger family. For those of you who do not know, rhizome is the stem of a plant found underground. Turmeric is a major cash crop in Asia, India, and China and is largely used as a spice in curries, food additive, and pigment. It also has medicinal purposes as it has been used to treat rheumatism, body aches, skin diseases, diarrhea, inflammations and several other conditions. Ladies forget the Midol, cause Turmeric is here! It is considered to be an emmenagogue which stimulates blood flow to the pelvis/uterus but also is considered to be a carminative or drug used against cramps!
Several studies have shown that curcumin regulates both the activation and the proliferation of T cells. In one particular study curcumin inhibited the proliferation of lymphocytes induced by concanavalin A, phytohemagglutinin, and phorbol-12-myristate-13-acetate of lymphocytes in human spleen. Curcumin, in the same study, inhibited IL-2 synthesis and IL-2 induced proliferation of lymphocytes. From these results curcumin appears to be immunosuppressive by way of regulating IL-2.
Curcumin also has the ability to affect autoimmune diseases due to its ability to modulate immune cells and immune cell cytokines. Alzheimer's disease is known for amyloid plaques forming on the brain due to inflammation. Curcumin downregulates cytokines, such as TNF-alpha, IL-1beta, activities in blood monocytes as well as reducing the amyloid-beta plaque formation. In asthma, curcumin reduces lymphocyte production of IL-2, IL-5, GM-CSF, and IL-4. For all you inflammatory bowel diseases lovers out there, cucumin has got something for you too! In this disease it reduces inflammatory cytokine levels, impeding NO and O2 production along with suppressing NF-kB activation in colon epithelium.
Ganesh Chandra Jagetia, Bharat B. Aggarwal
Journal of Clinical Immunology, Vol 27, No. 1 January 2007
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7 comments:
Doesn't it seem strange to you that curcumin seems to cure EVERYTHING!! I find this review a little suspect because of it! I tried to look up some of the other articles and many are either lay reports or in very obscure journals...I mostly wanted to see what the curcumin was diluted in. The authors of this reveiw mention DMSO, which in itself has some anti-inflammatory properties.
On the other side...it does make me hungry for some curry!
Nice job!!
Well this was an interesting post. I don't really like Indian food at all but if this spice can actually help improve my immune system and get rid of those horrible cramps every month then I guess it really wouldn't hurt to eat some. After all I eat a lot of things that I don't like that are suppose to be good for me! That is wierd and also cool how curcumin seems to help out in just about every disease.
this article had so much info on the effects of curcumin on the immune cells and was very interesting, however i would have liked them to include a detailed section on methods and materials used in some of the studies.
more mechanisms would be important in convincing me about curcumin
Does everyone know how to use PubMed? A quick search under "curcumin" shows that there has never been a clinical study that reliably showed efficacy for this substance. In other words it might have some benefit but there is no evidence for that at present. Lots of things work in tissue culture; for example, sulfuric acid kills tumor cells, but I don't think it would get too far in a Phase I trial.
PubMed Search
At first glance of this article I never really heard of Curcumin and I thought this could be some miracle drug that could be used. Then as I sat back and thought about it i realized if it was such a miracle drug why was it that I never heard of it, you think it would be more highly promoted and thats when my skepticism kicked in. I think it there are many good points in this aricle but yet there has to be a down side somewhere. Kawanishi et al. (2005) remark that curcumin is a "double-edged sword" having both anti-cancer and carcinogenic effects and that its carcinogenic effects are because its interfernce with p53 tumor suppressor pathway.
It seems strange to me that a compound could down regulate so many proinflammatory cytikines. I realize in chronic inflammatory states, these cytokines are out of control, but perhaps administering something that lowers so many isn't such a good idea.
I'm also curious as to which chemokines curcumin down regulates, as well as whether IL-10 is increased when curcumin is administered.
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