secret of red wine's health benefits 'uncorked'
Since it was first suggested as the reason for red wines cardioprotective effects in 1992, it has been known that resveratrol acts as an anti-inflammatory. Exactly how this phytoalexin - or plant antibiotic - controlled inflammation has alluded researchers until recently.
New research from scientists in Scotland and Singapore reveal exactly how resveratrol controls inflammation, and demonstrate how it - or a derivative - can be used to treat potentially deadly inflammatory diseases such as peritonitis, appendicitis and systemic sepsis.
"Strong acute inflammatory diseases such as sepsis are very difficult to treat and many die every day due to lack of treatment," said Alirio Melendez, senior lecturer on the faculty of medicine at Glasgow Biomedical Research Centre in Scotland and one of the researchers involved in the work. "Moreover, many survivors of sepsis develop a very low quality of life due to the damage that inflammation causes to several internal organs. The ultimate goal of our study was to identify a potential novel therapy to help in the treatment of strong acute inflammatory diseases."
In the study, researchers pre-treated one group of mice with resveratrol, while leaving a control group untreated. They then administered an inflammatory agent to the two groups of mice to observe the response. The non-treated mice showed a strong inflammatory response, simulating disease in humans - while he resveratrol treated mice were protected from the inflammation. Examining tissue samples of the treated mice revealed that resveratrol prevented the body from creating two different kinds of molecules known to trigger inflammation - sphingosine kinase and phospholipase D. The findings suggest that resveratrol could be suitable as a treatment for inflammatory diseases and may also lead to entirely new resveratrol-based drugs that are even more effective.
"The therapeutic potential of red wine has been bottled up for thousands of years," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, "and now that scientists have uncorked its secrets, they find that studies of how resveratrol works can lead to new treatments for life-threatening inflammation."
The research is published in the August 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal.
The abstract is available online: http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/8/2412
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