quite common in Iranian and other Asian cuisines, could potentially delay the aging process, a report on fruit flies indicates.
Mahtab Jafari, the Tehran-born assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California at Irvine, has found that curcumin prolongs the life of the drosophila or fruit fly by about 20 percent.
Not only does it increase the lifespan of the fruit flies, which are often used in studies because of their short lives (10 days) and similarity to human genes and aging pathways, but the spice also helps the quality of the flies’ lives, improving mobility and preventing tumors.
“Preliminary results from laboratory studies suggest the spice has anti-inflammatory, anticancer and antioxidant properties,” says Jafari. In her article for the academic journal, Rejuvenation Research, she added that for these and other reasons, there is a possibility of curcumin treatments for mammals in the future.
For now, Jafari’s results cannot be assumed for humans, but she is starting to experiment on mice with a fellow scientist, Samuel E. Schriner. “As you know, you can’t study lifespan extension in humans, we just live too long,” she said.
Jafari, who once worked Abbott Laboratories, became interested in slowing the aging process at the molecular level after a decade of research in cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. “I realized it all falls under the umbrella of aging,” she said.
After screening “75 possible anti-aging compounds, botanicals and pharmaceuticals,” Jafari found Rhodiola rosea, the plant that produces the spice extract, to be the most effective. Indeed, research from the last 70 years has shown other health benefits of the plant, such as lower blood levels of glucose in diabetic mice and slower tumor and cancer growth in rats.
Jafari and her team have demonstrated that in addition to prolonging the life of flies, the Rhodiola rosea protects cultured human cells from damage caused by ultraviolet light and the widely-used herbicide paraquat.
What adds to the intrigue of the plant and its spice is that it does not use the same methods of other anti-aging agents to protect cells from oxidation.
Researchers do not know yet how exactly curcumin works, but for Jafari, “The data is so exciting that some nights I just want to wake up at 4 a.m. and start writing.”
While they may not specifically know why the flies in Jafari’s experiment lived so much longer than normal, because curcumin affected the age-associated genes, “We can hypothesize that it affected the aging process.” Time will tell if this spice, which has been used in folk medicine for centuries, will truly lead to longer lives.