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TRANSCRIPT
Samuel Klein, MD., Director, Center for Human Nutrion
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
Resveratrol is a polyphenol, a compound in grapes and berries and even in some seeds like peanuts, that may have some important properties in effecting a pathway called the Sirtuin Pathway. It may have multiple effects on different organs. It has been linked to increasing aging and reducing disease.
Red wine does contain resveratrol. But the amount contained in red wine is actually quite small compared to the amount you can get in the pill forms that are being made for these different studies evaluating the effect of resveratrol.
It is estimated you would really need to drink about 600 bottles of wine per day to get the dose that is being used in some of these clinical trials.
We don't know exactly how it works, but it looks like this compound, through sirtuin, could effect DNA and stabilize DNA to reduce cell death and increase the age of cells.
It also might have direct effects on different organs like fat tissue, muscle tissue, liver tissue, lung tissue, even the brain, to improve function of those organs.
So there are studies right now evaluating the effects of resveratrol in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
This is a 12-week randomized clinical trial, meaning some subjects will get a placebo, a dummy pill, and some will be randomized to be receiving resveratrol.
We will do our evaluations both before and after 12 weeks of therapy.
We do have another arm which is looking at calorie restriction and weight loss because one of the mechanisms that increases sirtuin, which is the target of resveratrol, is calorie restriction.
We want to see if calorie restriction itself will give you the same effects as being treated with resveratrol.
So with these results we will be able to see what the metabolic function of resveratrol "in-vivo", meaning in the whole body, looking at the metabolic effects in the human condition. And then we will have tissue samples, cell samples, to try to understand what the mechanisms in the cell might be responsible for these findings that we see in-vivo, in the whole body.
If we see a relationship and we see there is an effect of resveratrol, we certainly will take it further and try and hone down the mechanisms that are responsible for this effect.
I do not think it is a magic pill, but time will tell. I'm always skeptical until we see the data.
But we just have to follow the data, good or bad, and go where the data will lead us. It would be very nice if this compound does have some important metabolic benefits for humans. If it does, it is a relatively safe and harmless compound. If it does have beneficial effects I think it would be incorporated as part of our therapy for potentially preventing the aging process and treating chronic disease.
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