Montano, Elena (2020) Curcumin: a natural approach in Neurodegenerative Diseases. [Tesi di dottorato]

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Neurodegenerative diseases are a group of diseases characterized by neuronal death in different areas of the central nervous system, nevertheless it is clear that these are systemic diseases and that also peripheral symptoms strongly affect the quality of life of affected people. Up to now, no effective treatment to counteract any of the symptoms is available. In this scenario, we think that treatments based on nutraceuticals which have a more systemic effect on human health and very low toxicity, might be a possible solution to improve the quality of life of patients. Thus, we here investigated the potential beneficial effect of the nutraceutical curcumin, in the R6/2 mouse model of Huntington’s disease (HD), a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder characterized by degeneration of striatal neurons and by different peripheral disturbances such as unwanted body weight loss and intestinal alterations. Data presented indicate that curcumin can be chronically administrated to a mouse model of HD with systemic beneficial effects. In fact, not only brain dysfunctions but also recovery of weight loss and general intestinal functions greatly ameliorate in treated animals. Further, we also investigated whether neurons differentiated from human iPSC-derived neural progenitor cells could represent a suitable in vitro model to test different substances able to control excitotoxicity, a very complex phenomenon of neuronal death due to excessive stimuli by excitatory aminoacids which contributes to neuronal death in neurodegenerative diseases.

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