The Pharmacognosy and Therapeutic Efficacy of Turmeric (Curcuma Longa): A Systematic Review

Turmeric is a well-known natural product, native to Southeast Asia, commonly used for a variety of cultural traditions and health benefits. Generally referred to as curcumin, it is a member of the Zingiberaceae, or ginger family, utilized for its roots and known for its vibrant yellow hue. Culturally, it is primarily incorporated into cooking and as an integral part of religious rituals and ceremonies. Chemically, turmeric is classified as a phenolic compound, made up of many curcuminoids, each with varying levels of activity. Therapeutically, its health benefits include anti-inflammatory, anti-hyperlipidemia, anti-oxidant and anti-pruritic properties. The pharmacognosy of curcumin modulates inflammatory molecules and oxidative stress mediators associated with the pathology of various conditions. Measuring clinical improvements in pain scores using various scales such as the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Arthritis Index (WOMAC) and the visual analog scale (VAS), reached significance when assessing for therapeutic efficacy in patients with osteoarthritis. Other studies for pruritus and hyperlipidemia also reached significance when measuring biomarkers of oxidative stress and lipid levels to determine therapeutic efficacy in the respective disease states. Doses vary based upon the disease state, but most patients typically tolerate high doses, up to 12 g per day. However, because of its chemistry, turmeric is poorly absorbed, quickly metabolized, and rapidly eliminated, restricting therapeutic efficacy and overall bioavailability. Combined piperine formulations may enhance bioavailability and absorption of curcumin into the body. Other limitations that exist when determining true therapeutic efficacy of curcumin include a wide variation of sample populations, with very specific disease characteristics, and a biased group of researchers because the same group of authors publish many studies. Therefore, the ability to extrapolate the conclusions from these trials to the average population is limited. Ongoing studies are currently exploring therapeutic properties and efficacy of turmeric in cancer and dementia as a potential future treatment option

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe