A Realistic View on “The Essential Medicinal Chemistry of Curcumin”

On page 1621, line 11, the authors mention that the in vivo stability of curcumin is T1/2 < 5 min and F < 1% by referring to the research papers of Wang et al.2 and Yang et al.3 (refs 27 and 28 of the original paper). Interestingly, neither Wang nor Yang et al. directly report these values as the half-life of curcumin, which makes this a very biased supposition of the authors. The paper, published by Wang et al., reports the stability of curcumin in buffer solvents at laboratory conditions and in rat blood circulation. Since it is impossible to directly dissolve curcumin in water, curcumin was dissolved in methanol and then diluted with a buffer, and the amount of curcumin was measured in HPLC at different intervals. It is obvious that curcumin will start precipitating upon dilution with a buffer. Thus, it is doubtful that the sample injected in HPLC or administered to rats includes the supposed amount of curcumin