McKinney Chiropractor Best Practices

Research Commentary;

Decrease Inflammation That Causes Pain

A review of

Aggarwal, Bharat B., and Kuzhuvelil B. Harikumar. “Potential Therapeutic Effects of Curcumin, the Anti-Inflammatory Agent, against Neurodegenerative, Cardiovascular, Pulmonary, Metabolic, Autoimmune and Neoplastic Diseases.” The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology, vol. 41, no. 1, 2009, pp. 40–59., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocel.2008.06.010.

Research Reviewed By Dr. Erik Waldeland

Summarized Review Conclusions

As natural health care providers, we get asked frequently about various supplements and if they may be of benefits for any given condition.  For the most part, we try to keep the supplementation to a minimum and encourage our patients to get their vitamins and minerals through food.  One of the big supplements we get asked about is Turmeric (a source of curcumin), so I wanted to dive into the research and make it easy to digest.  A main goal for all of our patients is the decrease inflammation, which is a major source of most peoples’ pain.  Below you will see a couple of the key findings from the attached research and why Turmeric may be a good addition to some peoples supplement list in order to decrease inflammation, as well as provide many other potential health benefits.

“This agent has been shown to regulate numerous transcription factors, cytokines, protein kinases, adhesion molecules, redox status and enzymes that have been linked to inflammation.”

“The process of inflammation has been shown to play a major role in most chronic illnesses, including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, pulmonary, metabolic, autoimmune and neoplastic diseases. In the current review, we provide evidence for the potential role of curcumin in the prevention and treatment of various pro-inflammatory chronic diseases.”

“Curcumin has been shown to exhibit activity against various neurologic diseases, including AD (Lim et al., 2001), multiple sclerosis (Natarajan and Bright, 2002), Parkinson disease (Zbarsky et al., 2005), epilepsy (Sumanont et al., 2006), cerebral injury (Ghoneim et al., 2002), age-associated neurodegeneration (Calabrese et al., 2003), schizopherenia”

Introduction to the Research

Our growing knowledge of that causes disease in the body is helping identify interventions and ways we can minimize or fight those diseases.  Research continues to show us that inflammation is a major cause of most metabolic diseases in our body, so decreasing that inflammation is crucial not only for our patients to get out of pain, but to health them continue to live a healthy lifestyle.  In various chronic illnesses in which inflammation is known to play a major role, curcumin has been shown to exhibit therapeutic potential.

Research Methodology

The authors of this article went through a systematic review of the effects of curcumin against various pro-inflammatory diseases.  In this review, the authors detailed curcumins role against neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular diseases, allergies, asthma, bronchitis, inflammatory bowel disease, RA, and psoriasis.

Research Findings

This research review revealed curcumin to be incredibly beneficial when assessing its effects on the conditions listed above.   Considering that inflammation plays a major role in most chronic illnesses, anti-inflammatory agents are needed for prevention purposes. Although several different steroids and NSAIDS, most of them have side effects, especially when consumed over long periods of time. Because curcumin inhibits multiple proinflammatory pathways and is affordable, it should be further explored for prevention and treatment of various chronic diseases.

Research References

As always with these reviews, these are my takeaways from the article and I encourage you to read the article in its entirety.  The references used in this article by the authors of this article are listed here.

Our Message

When you are looking for a Chiropractor near you that you can trust, choose one who will not only get rid of your back pain, neck pain, or headaches but who will also guide you to living a healthier lifestyle to keep you out of pain. Our McKinney Chiropractors, located near the corner of Eldorado Pkwy. and Stonebridge Dr., will teach you what the research says about how and why we should eat a better diet, move more and have more positive thoughts. By improving these areas of our lives we can restore motion and decrease stress while staying out of pain!