Evaluation of curcumin as add-on therapy in patients with Parkinson's disease: A pilot randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled trial.
Eligible patients were randomly assigned to either the curcumin (n = 30, 80 mg/day) or placebo (n = 30) groups and were followed for nine months.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/356...
Conclusion: While curcumin is a well-tolerated natural compound, this trial was unsuccessful in showing its efficacy in the quality of life and clinical symptoms of PD patients.
9 month disease modifying trials can take a hike, frankly. No kidding they arent seeing significant differences in that time. Hell, it takes IPSC implants longer than that to move the dial.
For contrast and including the following interesting conclusion:
Multiple regression models showed a significant effect of curcumin supplementation in decreasing the worsening of the clinical parameters and p-syn load at after curcumin treatment.
academic.oup.com/jnen/artic...
good point. I updated the title.
Good study Kevopd!
"The Effect of Curcumin on Clinical Outcome
The untreated group showed worsening of all clinical scales despite the increase of L-dopa dosage (Table 2). The curcumin-supplemented group, which was not allowed to increase L-dopa dosage, showed an increase only of MDS-UPDRS and H&Y scores, although the increases were less than those in the untreated group. It should be emphasized that COMPASS-31 and NMSS decreased over the follow-up with an opposite trend compared to the untreated group (Table 2 and Fig. 2). PD patients with shorter disease duration (<6 years, 9 patients) had a better outcome than patients with longer disease duration, based on mean changes in used clinical scales: MDS-UPDRS (4 vs 7, respectively), H&Y (0.2 vs 0.4), COMPASS-31 (−2 vs 1), and NMSS (−3 vs −1)."
Radically different dosages:
"Twenty-one patients agreed to start the curcumin supplementation (supplemented group): 2 g per day of curcumin as curcumin phospholipids as Meriva (1 g b.i.d. of Maxicur)"
Versus the study in the post only used 80 milligrams, which is way low – only 4 percent of 2 grams.
You are right. 30 and 80mg per day dosages are too low. At least 500mg should be evaluated
hi, question about curcumin, i know curcumin comes from turmeric.
why not take turmeric to get all the benefits from a variety of its ingredients and not just single curcumin out? thxs
There’s so much information out there that it takes multiple researchers to tease it all out into a manageable heap and, sometimes, a conclusion of sorts. Nice teamwork people. I can keep taking my theracumin hp which I’ve been taking for 2.5 years. Mindful of the fact that consuming large doses of turmeric supplements can significantly increase the levels of urinary oxalate, increasing the risk of kidney stone formation. Moderation has its place.
This experiment is a waste of time and designed to fail.
On Amazon the vast majority of the offerings have 500mg pills. With the dosage at two pills for 1gm per day dosing.
And there is self reported relief at this level: 1gm per day
Am I surprised that nothing happens at 30 mg per day
😜
This study was designed to fail. Anyone who is doing a study on curcumin to actually treat a disease would at least know the doses where curcumin has shown efficacy in other studies or how else would you have any idea of what type of dose you should be using to treat PD?
Their dose is so low, I doubt you can even find a supplement of curcumin at 80 mg per serving. In cancer studies from over a decade ago, they were already testing 8 grams per day dosing in order to see anything resembling benefit in cancer patients. That's 100 times the dose used in this study! Yes, this study had only one purpose and that was to fail.
Art
yes, should I delete this post or leave it? I mean such bad studies are a waste of time and money. And they bring people down.
Leave it. It provokes good discussion which brings forward better data.
I agree with Marc, leave it up.
This is a good example of studies that are done, apparently for the purpose of getting the funding and doing the study and nothing more. Any serious researcher familiar with curcumin would have known going in that the dose was too low to offer any benefit. In curcumin studies it is already established that if you are expecting any significant benefit then you have to use a dose that is at least 12 times the amount that they used. Here is a typical newer example of such a study that used 1 gram + Piperine total per day in Covid-19 patients and this dose barely started to show minimal benefit :
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...
If you are looking for real benefit with curcumin, I think you need to be using 4 grams/day minimum unless it is a specialized form of curcumin such as nano curcumin or liposomal, but even then, an 80 mg dose is going to be at the very bottom of the dosing spectrum.
In the study link below you can see that 4000 mg/day is a more useful dosing schedule in humans :
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...
How is it that a research team doing a study on curcumin isn't already aware of these facts prior to designing their study?
Art
maybe the information is not readily available in this country? Meriva is promoted as being better absorbed and it appears they used the micronized variety even though the dose was definitely low and that seems like the problem--I have been trying to do research on which types are better absorbed then I found this study on it. Comparative absorption of curcumin formulationsncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...
Yes, Meriva is available here and would fall into the liposome category that I mentioned in my reply.
Thank you for the link about curcumin formulations. Something worth considering regarding curcumin that is sometimes overlooked is its effects on the gut microbiome. This could be a potential reason why curcumin has shown positive health effects despite its poor absorbance, bioavailability and rapid elimination. Perhaps a major part of what curcumin does is altering the gut microbiome toward a healthier environment.
Art
Thanks much for your link
The conclusion states
“A formulation of curcumin with a combination of hydrophilic carrier, cellulosic derivatives and natural antioxidants”By chance would you know of any brand /s that would fit this description
Kind regards
BR
this is what I found doing a search- it is kind of like a claim but it is backed by research: nutraingredients-usa.com/Ar...
Thanks much. Appreciate your checkings and the info
Leave it, it helps show how to think about studies in general. It very much matters the difference between good studies and weak studies, also for thinking about how you have to either know, or make some assumptions, what the actual purpose of a study might be in the first place, how you unwittingly make assumptions that may or may not provide a reasonable context for what you get to read...becoming aware how you interact with what is there, assumptions you make that unwittingly introduce bias and error that make your effort to see what is there or not there fail.
Look at my other entry the last para for example, i.e., where I speculate that maybe study could have been meant to weed out all but the really most potent agents as worth committing real, and real-money, justifiable efforts to come, when you don't have unlimited money or long long time frames to deal with all the potential candidates where there are subtle effects or no effects. If you have to get good bang for your limited bucks, you don't want a methodology that will take a decade and 20 million dollars sifting for a needle in a haystack, you can often eliminate a lot of time wasting and resource wasting with a good screen...was that what this was? Unfortunately I don't get to read the actual, probably 20 page paper that normally would be expected to fill in all the blanks that the study website left open.
good points
I take walmart.com/ip/Curcumin-650... contains a little Turmeric Essential Oil
Not willing to give up on Curcumin over this study.
"5. Concluding Remarks
Curcumin is a neuroprotective agent with antioxidant [35,36], anti-inflammatory [86], free radical scavenging [107], mitochondrial protecting [62], and iron-chelating properties [125], which enhance DA levels in the brain [62]. ... The evidence reviewed supports curcumin’s powerful molecular and cellular effects in neurodegenerative disorders as an appealing strategy for improving PD management and prognosis."
Sorry, but where was the detailed description of patient eligibility and the actual patient characteristics, there are quite a lot of relevant variables to deal with to come up with actual systematic selection of a reasonably homogeneous group for a study to legitimately measure in such a small end group (about 20 each)...with the number of variables I think would be relevant, you'd need something on the order of several hundred subjects...we don't have really any actual description of the patient characteristics and how they actually matched up in the scales claimed for comparison...and as park noted, very low doses and very short study duration.
The whole thing that is available reads like a black box. Also missing was the author discussion concerning weakness of the study. Just leaves me with an awful lot of questions and not a lot of basis to be confident. it all left me wondering just what were they really trying to do, from what I could see, not much. In fact, really not anything. One of those where you'd want to get them in a room for questions, including "exactly what were you thinking? None of this seems constructed to be worth the effort to address your initial stated purpose, and any scientist would see that as fairly obvious...so what was it that you were really trying to do?"
Now of course I didn't try to get beyond the paywall. Maybe they covered all of these, which would make for a very detailed and lengthy paper. All I could get from the Elsevier site was really just really a bland summary, really not much more than the press abstract. Maybe they were screening for an effect that is so strong as to be worth serious expense for real study, and would be readily apparent from such a thin preliminary study here, and in that case that sort of purpose would make sense.
updated the title to say that it is a low 80 mg/day dose study
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