The Inimitable Tiff

It seems that you can now add eating curry and a drug that lowers blood pressure, called valsartan, to the limited potential arsenal against Alzheimer disease, that is at least in the laboratory.

It’s still unclear how exactly eating more curry (it’s actually a chemical found in tumeric called curcumin) or valsartan could work in humans but it just goes to show how desperate we’ve become when faced with the fear of Alzheimer disease.

The interesting thing about curry is that Indian cooking contains heaps of it. Could this be the reason that Alzheimer disease is so relatively scarce in that country? No one knows. My Grandmother is not one to wait. She’s been self-medicating with a teaspoon a day of tumeric for almost a decade now. No wonder her home always smells of an south Asian spice market.

There’s a lot of money to be made for any potential curatives just look at Exelon from Novartis (whose efficacy some neurologists question) that brought in a cool 461 million USD, (up 14%!) from last year’s third quarter. Having had the displeasure of a few family members suffer through this disease I’m still hopeful there will be a big breakthrough soon. In the meantime I better go, my sag paneer is getting cold.