Interesting reply to my earlier post about the Alzheimer's fighting effect of curcumin, a chemical found in turmeric:
David Soleimani-Meigooni sez: Curcumin also has many other clinical properties such as
anti-cancer/anti-tumor, anti-inflamatory, and anti-oxidant properties.
I have had the opportunity to research (and publish) on the
anti-cancerous properties of curcumin on prostate cancer cells, both
from the direct application of curcumin and use of curcumin as a
radiosensitizing agent, in-vitro. Curcumin was found to induce cell
death of prostate cancer cells, and a 2 microMolar concentration of
the curcumin coumpound combined with radiation enhanced the effect of
the radiation by a factor of 2.61 on the prostate cancer cells.
This
combined (radiosensitizing) effect theoretically means that the
application of 2 microMolar of curcumin would allow 2.61 times less
radiation to be utilized to achieve the same biological effect as a
radiation-alone treatment. Because radiosensitization utilizing
curcumin can allow smaller doses of radiation to be theoretically used
for treatment, there is a much lesser effect of radiation to the
surrounding normal tissues that receive radiation when treating a
cancerous target (ultimately there could be less complications to a
patient following radiation therapy).
I would just like to emphasize
once more that the research that I performed has only been performed
in-vitro on tissue cultures, and is far from being applied in a
clinical setting. A simple pubmed search of curcumin could give you a
greater idea of the all the academically researched, medical
applications of curcumin.
I also wanted to point out this epidemiological sudy of the Indian
population that shows that their extremely low rate of digestive tract
cancers can be attributable to "the presence of natural antioxidants
such as curcumin in Indian cooking": Link
