Study: Curcumin spice boosts memory by 30%, eases depression

What is up with all the alt-medicine spam on HN?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346970/

"The likely false activity of curcumin in vitro and in vivo has resulted in >120 clinical trials of curcuminoids against several diseases. No double-blinded, placebo controlled clinical trial of curcumin has been successful."

But this posted study is placebo controlled, right? It was also published 5 years after the link you posted

Well, HN is the target market for a lot of these things. The idea that you can take a magic pill or supplement and suddenly be better than you were is appealing to the sorts you find on here.

The conflict statement for the paper submitted is thick, and also buried at the end of the discussion rather than conspicuously presented up front lol

> The University of California, Los Angeles, owns a U.S. patent (6,274,119) entitled “Methods for Labeling ß-Amyloid Plaques and Neurofibrillary Tangles”, which has been licensed to TauMark, LLC. Drs. Small, Satyamurthy, Huang, and Barrio are among the inventors and have financial interest in TauMark, LLC. Dr. Small also reports having served as an advisor to and/or having received lecture fees from Allergan, Argentum, Axovant, Cogniciti, Forum Pharmaceuticals, Herbalife, Janssen, Lundbeck, Lilly, Novartis, Otsuka, and Pfizer. Dr. Heber reports receiving consulting fees from Herbalife, and the McCormick Science Institute.

The true tell, though:

> The manufacturer of Theracurmin, Theravalues Corporation, provided the Theracurmin and placebo for the trial, funds for laboratory testing of blood curcumin levels, and funds for Dr. Small's travel to the 2017 Alzheimer's Association International Conference for presentation of the findings.

Thank you for this. I wish this community was a little more skeptical

Notable: no direct reference to "conflict" or related terms in the original paper, but the conflict statement comes at the end of the discussion:

> The University of California, Los Angeles, owns a U.S. patent (6,274,119) entitled “Methods for Labeling ß-Amyloid Plaques and Neurofibrillary Tangles”, which has been licensed to TauMark, LLC. Drs. Small, Satyamurthy, Huang, and Barrio are among the inventors and have financial interest in TauMark, LLC. Dr. Small also reports having served as an advisor to and/or having received lecture fees from Allergan, Argentum, Axovant, Cogniciti, Forum Pharmaceuticals, Herbalife, Janssen, Lundbeck, Lilly, Novartis, Otsuka, and Pfizer. Dr. Heber reports receiving consulting fees from Herbalife, and the McCormick Science Institute. The manufacturer of Theracurmin, Theravalues Corporation, provided the Theracurmin and placebo for the trial, funds for laboratory testing of blood curcumin levels, and funds for Dr. Small's travel to the 2017 Alzheimer's Association International Conference for presentation of the findings.

They saved the worst conflict for last, of course. This paper earns a pretty easy Flag.

> In an 18 month, placebo-controlled study with 40 subjects (age 51–84 years), researchers found that 90mg of curcumin twice a day improved outcomes of verbal, visual, and attention test scores by 28%.

> Dr. Gary Small of the Longevity Center at the University of California and a team of 15 other scientists tested the compound on 40 adults aged between 51 and 84, all of whom had mild memory problems.

> For a total of 18 months, the participants were randomized to one of two groups. One group took 90 milligrams of curcumin twice daily, while the other group took a placebo. The curcumin used in this study was a bioavailable form called Theracurmin, which the researchers describe as a “form of curcumin with increased intestinal endothelium penetrability”

The highlight here, for me, is the "all of whom had mild memory problems". In pretty much everything I've seen about cognitive performance improvement, "fixing a problem" is way easier than improving performance. I wouldn't expect a 30% boost for patients that don't have mild memory problems.

I wouldn't expect the boost in patients who were not in a study funded by theracumin

In that case I would be curious if these differences show themselves in people from different cultures that consume Turmeric en masse. For example, my aging parents consume significant amounts of turmeric (approx. 250 mg) for 2 out of 3 meals every day.

this makes me curious how kidney stone rates differ across cultures with different levels of consumption of high-oxalate foods like turmeric, cumin, black pepper, etc.

The Wiki article suggests it has not performed well in previous trials: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curcumin#MedicalResearch

Given that this study produced a very large effect, I suspect a mistake was made somewhere.

Edit: this study seems to use a more bioavailable form actually, theracumin

I found this review of several studies which suggests that maybe there is something to theracumin

https://www.xiahepublishing.com/2472-0712/ArticleFullText.as...

This study was funded by the people who make theracumin. Were the other ones as well?

Examine.com is a great site to summarize and analyze studies on supplements:

https://examine.com/supplements/curcumin/

Link to cited study: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jagp.2017.10.010

Be careful if you take curcumin and are also taking medication that is metabolized by CYP2D6, as it is a CYP2D6 inhibitor. It will likely increase side effects and the duration of effect for those medications. It still blows my mind that this information is not given out with these medications (as there are other common CYP2D6 and P450 inhibitors with the same effect).

Don't ever spill this stuff in your kitchen. Nothing quite like it to clean up. Gets into every crevice.

40 subjects.

For an 18 month trial 40 subjects is not bad

And an effect size this large shouldn't need many subjects...though 28% strikes me as too good to be true.

Sample size can be small if the controls are good and the effect is large. 40 could be way too many for some studies, way too few for others. "40 subjects" means nothing by itself.

Fair enough! My intuition would be the more subjects the better. I realize there’s probably a whole field of study on this subject, and intuition is often wrong :)

and published in American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry with an impact factor of 4...

Nice. I look at it later. That is, if I don't forget.

But does it make safe and accurate interstellar travel possible?