Extracts from turmeric spice, known for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, may help ward off heart attacks in people who have had recent bypass surgery, according to a study from Thailand. During bypass surgery the heart muscle can be damaged by prolonged lack of blood flow, increasing the patient's risk of heart attack. But the new findings, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, suggest that curcumins – the yellow pigment in turmeric – may ease those risks when added to traditional drug treatment. Turmeric extracts have long been used in traditional Chinese and Indian medicine. Research has suggested inflammation plays an important role in the development of a range of diseases, including heart disease, and curcumins could have an effect on those pathways, said Bharat Aggarwal, who studies the use of curcumins in cancer therapy at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. The researchers studied 121 patients who had non-emergency bypass surgery at their hospital between 2009 and 2011. They found that during the patients' post-bypass hospital stays, 13 percent of those who had been taking curcumins had a heart attack, compared to 30 percent in the placebo group. They calculated that people on curcumins had a 65 percent lower chance of heart attack. Researchers said it's likely that the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of curcumins may have helped limit heart damage in the patients. “Curcumin has for many years now been shown to reduce inflammation and to reduce oxygen toxicity or damage caused by free radicals in a number of experimental settings,” said Jawahar Mehta, a cardiologist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. “But that doesn't mean that this is a substitute for medication,” he said, noting that drugs like aspirin, statins and beta blockers have been proven to help heart patients and people in the current study were taking those as well.
