Turmeric could help with heart failure
From The National Post:
“The spice that gives the kick to many Indian curry dishes might also help prevent the ravages of heart failure, a surprising new Canadian animal study has concluded.
Researchers at Toronto’s University Health Network found that curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric, both prevents and dramatically reverses enlargement of the heart in mice.
Enlarged hearts can lead to cardiac failure, a common and often fatal condition where the organ is unable to pump enough blood to keep the body functioning properly.
If similar results were one day duplicated in humans, the widely available spice could repair heart damage in a way no drug is able to do now, say researchers behind the study, to be published Friday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Curcumin has the added benefit of causing virtually no toxic side effects in even relatively large doses.
Despite their earlier hopes for the ingredient, researchers were taken aback by the scope of the improvement it actually made to the mice hearts.
“That was quite a surprise,” said Dr. Maral Ouzounian, a research fellow at the network’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre. “It was quite dramatic.”
The next step is to try to ….”
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