Stefano and I are leaving early tomorrow morning for Rome and will be back in Florence on Monday night. During this long weekend, I will not be able to access my e-mail or my blog…in fact, I probably won’t even turn on my computer until Tuesday afternoon, after I return home from work.

Before wishing everyone a very Happy Easter, though, I just wanted to go back for a moment to the more scientific aspect of that “Word of caution” study that I have written about in two recent posts. In the abstract, the authors state the following: it is known that curcumin inhibits interleukin-12 production in dendritic cells, thereby dampening the Th1 response. It is also well established that Th1 cells are protective against invading pathogens and tumors.

Okay, the authors clearly seem quite concerned about curcumin’s inhibition of IL-12. Some of my blog readers have written to me expressing this concern, too. In the beginning, I was a bit uneasy, too. Well, I would just like to point out that, after doing a wee bit of research this afternoon, I found out that curcumin is not the sole inhibitor of this interleukin…

Dexamethasone also inhibits IL-12 (see http://tinyurl.com/yfjxfyk), as do thalidomide (see http://tinyurl.com/ydceuyw and http://tinyurl.com/y8h6r57), lenalidomide (see http://tinyurl.com/yeb7vjk) and, oh let’s see, bortezomib (http://tinyurl.com/ycdcksh). And these drugs (there may be more, incidentally, I just don’t have the time right now to check) are commonly used in conventional myeloma treatment…

And here is my point: I haven’t seen any conventional doctors getting all hopped up about the inhibition of IL-12 by conventional myeloma drugs…on the contrary, not one study (of those that I have glanced at so far) have expressed even the slightest concern about this inhibition.

As a result, my concern over curcumin’s inhibition of IL-12 has now gone down to a big fat zero, no question about that. I may decide, in fact, not to pursue this matter any further, even though I have already found and read a number of studies on this topic…Oh, this is bloody ridiculous…I am so annoyed to have wasted time on a pile of…NONSENSE! Uffa.

Well, I just thought that this bit of news would give us something to chew on over the Easter weekend…! 😉 Enough. It’s getting late, and I still have a few things to do… 

Happy Easter, everyone! Buona Pasqua a tutti!