I’ve noticed
recently there have been a couple of articles published about a compound called
resveratrol and its
effects on endometriosis. Resveratrol is
a compound found in many different types of plant, but mostly red skinned fruit
such as grapes. In recent years it has attracted much attention due laboratory
tests showing it to have potential as an anti-cancer drug. Most of the work is
in its early stages though and there are a lot of kinks to be worked out before
resveratrol, or drugs based on it, will appear in hospitals. Nevertheless many
people are investigating resveratrol for many different reasons.
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| In case you were wondering, this is what resveratrol looks like |
For example,
resveratrol has been suggested to have a whole range of beneficial properties
such as anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antidiabetic, cardio and neuroprotective effects
so it seemed only a matter of time before someone would start investigating
whether this compound could be used against endometriosis.
The first such
study comes from
Argentina and looked at the effect of resveratrol and another compound, EGCG
(which is found in green tea) on endometriosis that had been surgically induced
in mice. What they found was that, in mice given these two compounds, the
number, size and growth of the endometriotic lesions was reduced significantly.
This is quite an encouraging result, but animal models of endometriosis need to
be treated with caution because, although they are similar to what the disease
is like in humans, they cannot be exactly the same. What you need for an
accurate experiment is to test resveratrol’s effects in humans...
...which is
exactly what the next
study was looking at. This study comes from Brazil and was looking at 12
women with endometriosis who were taking the contraceptive pill as a treatment
but failed to obtain any pain relief from their dysmenorrhoea and pelvic pain. What
they did was give these women, in addition to their pill, a regime of 30mg a
day of resveratrol for 2 months. They assessed the women’s pain by using a
scoring system where a result of 3 indicated the highest amount of pain. At the
beginning, where the women were only taking the pill, their average pain score
was 2.1. Incredibly, after 2 months of the pill + resveratrol, their average
pain scores had dropped to 0.2.
The authors
of this study think that resveratrol acts as a natural aromatase inhibitor.
Aromatase being an enzyme sometimes found in endometriotic cells, which
basically can make them self sustaining and unresponsive to conventional
treatments. So resveratrol in combination with the pill seems to have a very
encouraging effect on dysmenorrhoea and pelvic pain, but this study only examined
12 women. In order to see if this result is correct this study needs to be
replicated with a much larger group of women and possibly compare resveratrol
to existing aromatase inhibiting drugs.
You may
recall that at the beginning of this post I mentioned that resveratrol is found
in many different types of fruit, so you can get it in your diet, but it’s also
found in red wine. Aha! You may think, time to crack open a bottle of Spanish
cabernet!
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| "Its medicinal, honestly" |
Image from Freedigitalphotos.net
Well before you reach for the bottle opener just be aware that, in
order to get a 30mg dose of resveratrol, you would need to drink between 2 and
15 litres of red wine a day (depending on the wine), which I would definitely
not recommend to anyone, ever. If you think you could get away with just eating
red grapes, more bad news I’m afraid, as you would have to eat nearly 4Kg of
red grapes a day to get the right dose. Even if you could somehow manage this
Herculean task, resveratrol is not absorbed very well by the body so you may
not see any benefits.
You can buy
resveratrol supplements, however you should NEVER buy anything from an unlicensed
pharmacy and, as a precaution, never buy anything off the internet. If you are
curious about resveratrol supplements I would recommend talking to either your
doctor or local pharmacist.
