Find Me A Cure

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The wonders of India’s staple spice turmeric seem to just keep popping up.

US scientists announced today that animal studies show turmeric extracts can prevent arthritis and bone loss.

The researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine have said their studies are the first to demonstrate the anti-arthritic effect of turmeric extracts called curcuminoids in living animals.

Several previous studies, including some by Indian researchers, have shown that turmeric’s curcumin extract can play a role as an anti-inflammatory agent and as an anti-tumour agent.

In the study reported today in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism, endocrinologist Janet Funk and her colleagues said their experiments also provide the first documentation of a mechanism of action — how curcumin-containing extracts protect the animals from arthritis.

The extracts inhibit a substance called NF-KBm which enhances the production of proteins that destroy joints in arthritis.

According to Funk, these findings pave the way for clinical trials required before turmeric supplements can be prescribed routinely to prevent or treat rheumatoid arthritis.

The study also shows that a turmeric extract blocked a biochemical process in the body that influences bone loss.

In women, bone loss usually begins before the onset of menopause. Funk has initiated another study to determine whether turmeric taken as a dietary supplement before menopause can prevent bone loss and osteoporosis.

Indian scientists who have been working on turmeric said they are not surprised by the findings. Scientists at the Institute of Cytology and Preventive Oncology in New Delhi had last year shown that turmeric might help fight the human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer. Their studies showed that curcumin blocked viral genes.

Three years ago, a team at the National Centre for Cell Science in Pune had revealed possible mechanisms by which curcumin demonstrates its anti-tumour effects.

The effect of curcumin on NF-KB, observed by Funk and her colleagues, suggests that turmeric dietary supplements share the same mechanism of action as anti-arthritic drugs under development. This finding also suggests that turmeric may find applications in other inflammatory diseases such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.

(As published in The Telegraph-Calcutta)

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NEW YORK: A new study has found a “substantial” drop in US men’s testosterone levels since the 1980s, but the reasons for the decline remain unclear. This trend also does not appear to be related to age.

The average levels of the male hormone dropped by 1% a year, Dr Thomas Travison and colleagues from the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Massachusetts, found.

This means that, for example, a 65-year-old man in 2002 would have testosterone levels 15% lower than those of a 65-year-old in 1987. This also means that a greater proportion of men in 2002 would have had below-normal testosterone levels than in 1987.

“The entire population is shifting somewhat downward we think,” Travison said. “We’re counting on other studies to confirm this.”

Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004.

While a man’s testosterone level will fall steadily as he ages, the researchers observed a speedier decline in average testosterone levels than would have been expected with aging alone.

They hypothesised that the rising prevalence of obesity as well as the sharp decline in cigarette smoking might help explain their findings, given that testosterone levels are lower among overweight people and smoking increases testosterone levels. But these factors accounted for only a small%age of the observed difference.

It’s likely that some sort of environmental exposure is responsible for the testosterone decline, Travison said, although he said attempting to explain what this might be based on the current findings would be “pure conjecture.”

The researchers used body mass index, the ratio of height to weight, to estimate obesity levels, he noted, but this is not a very accurate way to gauge the real adiposity, or fat content of the body, so it’s possible that obesity might be more of a factor than it appears in this analysis.

“I think like most things that are complex, it’s likely that there is no one cause,” he said.

(As published in The Times Of India)

Parents often think their children grow up too quickly, but few are prepared for the problem that Michael Dedekian and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported recently.

At the annual Pediatric Academic Society meeting in May in San Francisco, they presented a report that described how a preschool-age girl, and then her kindergarten-age brother, mysteriously began growing pubic hair. These cases were not isolated; in 2004, pediatric endocrinologists from San Diego reported a similar cluster of five children.

It turns out that there have been clusters of cases in which children have prematurely developed signs of puberty, outbreaks similar to epidemics of influenza or environmental poisonings. In 1979, the medical journal the Lancet described an outbreak of breast enlargement among hundreds of Italian schoolchildren, probably caused by estrogen contamination of beef and poultry.

Increasingly though the science is still far from definitive and the precise number of such cases is highly speculative some physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called “endocrine disruptors,” that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.

Most commonly, outbreaks of puberty in children are traced to accidental drug exposures from products that are used incorrectly. Dedekian’s first patient was evaluated for possible genetic endocrine problems and a rare brain tumour before the cause of her puberty was discovered. It turned out that her testosterone level was almost 100 times normal, in the range of an adult man.
(As published in the Times Of India)