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Curcumin improves memory, mood in adults without dementia
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Study findings indicate that daily consumption of a curcumin supplement known as Theracurmin improved memory and mood in adults without dementia.
“Epidemiological studies indicate a lower prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in Indian people who consume curcumin in curry and a link between dietary curry consumption and better cognitive performance in older adults,” Gary W. Small, MD, from the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA Longevity Center, and colleagues wrote. “Despite such promising research on curcumin's potential brain health benefits, initial placebo-controlled trials in humans have yielded negative results, perhaps because they used forms of curcumin with limited bioavailability.”
Researchers conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled study to better understand the effects of curcumin, found in the spice turmeric, on memory performance and its impact on brain amyloid and tau accumulation in 40 adults aged 50 to 90 years without dementia.
Participants randomly received either placebo (n = 19) or 90 milligrams of curcumin (n = 21) twice a day for 18 months and received standardized cognitive assessments at the start of the study and at 6-month intervals. The investigators monitored curcumin levels in participants’ blood and used positron emission tomography to determine the levels of amyloid and tau in 30 participants’ brains at the start of the study and after 18 months. Primary outcomes were verbal and visual memory, and a secondary outcome was attention.
Analysis showed that participants who received curcumin experienced significant improvements in their memory and attention abilities, but those who received placebo saw no improvements. Researchers found that participants who took curcumin experienced an improvement of 28% over the 18 months, according to memory test results. There were also mild improvements in mood seen in the curcumin group. The PET scans revealed significantly less amyloid and tau signals in the amygdala among curcumin-receivers compared with placebo. Although these signals did not change with curcumin in the hypothalamus, they increased with placebo.
“Our positive findings ... are encouraging that this relatively inexpensive and nontoxic treatment may have a potential for not only improving age-related memory decline, but also preventing or possibly staving off progression of neurodegeneration and eventually future symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease,” Small and colleagues wrote in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. “These results warrant further study in similar populations to confirm the observed cognitive benefits of curcumin and elucidate the underlying mechanisms responsible for such effects.” – by Savannah Demko
Disclosures: Small is an inventor and reports financial interest in TauMark, LLC. He 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. Theravalues Corporation funded Small's travel to the 2017 Alzheimer's Association International Conference for presentation of these findings. Please see the study for all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.