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

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:42:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments