Rhonda Patrick PhD tweeted a link to this abstract for a study that examined the effects of curcumin on tendon healing in rats. Since I was just working on a post that touched upon this subject, my curiosity was piqued, so I found the full paper. The full title is:
Curcumin Improves Tendon Healing in Rats: a Histological, Biochemical, and Functional Evaluation.
It’s hot off the presses and was just published in the “International Journal of Connective Tissue Research” in November 2015.
They took a group of 64 rats and cut out a piece of their patellar tendon from their right knee. Then they divided the rats into a control group that received saline and a treatment group that received 100 mg of curcumin per kg body weight.
The reason I like reading these papers directly instead of just scanning the abstract is because frequently you can find more information on what exact supplements they used, which brands, and where they were sourced.
In this study, the curcumin they used was from Sigma Aldrich, which is a large biotech corporation which provides pharmaceutical grade supplies for research and other purposes. It’s not your typical rinky-dink shady Amazon supplier.
After 14 days, the rats were sacrificed and their tendons examined. They found that:
In tendon injury model, curcumin significantly improved healing properties of injured tendon through well-organized collagen fiber, extensive deposition of collagen, decreased MDA level, and increase in the biomechanical properties and Mn-SOD activity of the regenerated tendon tissues. The current study showed that curcumin can improve the quality of tendon rupture healing. Curcumin could be a promising strategy in the management of injured tendon tissue.
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This pretty much confirms #3 on my prior post, “Taking Care of Your Tendons and Connective Tissues.”
My main sources of curcumin are:
The EXOS Curcumin contains 1000 mg per serving (two pills). So if they gave the rats 100 mg per kg of body weight, and I were to extrapolate that to my 90 kg body, that would be 9000 mg, or 18 pills. Yes, I realize that extrapolating data from rats to humans like this is completely unscientific, but it’s fun nevertheless.
… and if I ever develop a bout of tendinitis or a tendon tear in the future, I’d definitely consider increasing my curcumin supplementation to somewhere between 1 gm and 9 gm.
100 mg/kg dose, so an 80 kg man, such as myself, would need 8g. Pure turmeric has 3.14% weight as curcumin. Therefore, I would need to eat 254.7 grams of turmeric to get the same dosage – not very feasible.
That’s only a quarter kilo… wonder how much that would cost…