Alzheimer's and Rosemary Oil.

Integrative Medicine: Hopes developing for Alzheimer's treatment

Special to The Bee

Published Thursday, Mar. 22, 2012

If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, there are some additional unusual therapeutic holistic regimens that may be of benefit in improving cognition. Two new scientific studies in the past couple of months have shown some benefit in helping brain functioning amid Alzheimer's: one on meditation, the other on rosemary oil aromatherapy.

For the study on meditation and Alzheimer's, researchers enrolled 15 older adults with memory problems that ranged from mild age-associated memory impairment to mild impairment, on a Kirtan Kriya mantra-based meditation course. Participants meditated 12 minutes per day for eight weeks. The control group listened to classical music for the same amount of time over eight weeks.

Early findings showed a surprising, substantial increase in cerebral blood flow in the patients' prefrontal, superior frontal and superior parietal cortices, and also better cognitive function in the group that performed regular meditation.

In the rosemary oil aromatherapy study, the investigators tested cognitive performance and mood of 20 people, who were exposed to varying levels of the rosemary aroma. Using blood samples to detect the amount of 1,8-cineole (a measure of the aromatherapy rosemary oil in the bloodstream) the researchers applied speed and accuracy tests, and mood assessments to judge the rosemary oil's effects.

Results indicate for the first time in human subjects that concentration of 1,8- cineole in the blood is related to an individual's cognitive performance – with higher concentrations resulting in improved performance. Both speed and accuracy were improved in the study in cognitive functioning.

What do these two studies tell us about Alzheimer's? The brain is a complex organism, with many complex mechanisms that lead to optimum functioning. Early trials show that aromatherapy and meditation improve blood supply and enhance cognitive skills. Ongoing data are showing us that we have much power to help treat Alzheimer's integratively, keeping in mind that environment, exercise, health, lifestyle, meditation, music and smells can be all be beneficial in improving brain function.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

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Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden are medical directors of Sutter Downtown Integrative Medicine program. Have a question related to alternative medicine? Email adrenaline@sacbee.com.

NB: In our study of the olfactory system, we cover information on the connection between olfaction and dementia. People with all forms of senility, from mild dementia to full-blown Alzheiimer's, typically exhibit a loss of the sense of smell. This inhibits their ability to take in familiar scent-chemicals that identify people and possessions - hence, they forget who their loved ones are, and they forget where they live.

Herb Jelly

Here's a recipe I heard about from the African basket lady (Regina) at the Citrus Heights Farmer's Market today. It's made with Pomona's Pectin and apple cider or juice. The original recipe calls for dried Rosemary, but Regina says she made a great batch of jelly using dried Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) instead. She cautions not to use French lavender (Lavandin) because (as we know) it's too high in camphor.

Lavender or Rosemary Apple Jelly

4 cups apple cider or apple juice
4 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
4 teaspoons dried lavender or rosemary
4 teaspoons Pomona's pectin
2 teaspoons calcium water (from the Pomona's pectin box)
1/2 cup honey

Heat apple cider or juice in a medium size pot with apple cider vinegar and calcium water. Bring to a boil, add herbs, turn off and let steep for 30 minutes. Mix the pectin thoroughly with the honey. Strain out the herbs, add pectin/honey mixture and bring just to a boil. Take off burner, spoon into sterilized jars and process via the hot water bath method for about 5 minutes.

If you'd like to make the above recipe using essential oil (s) instead of the dried herb, modify the recipe as follows:

Same ingredients, but substitute one or two drops of therapeutic quality Lavandula angustifolia or Rosmarinus officinalis essential oil. Be sure to choose an essential oil that you KNOW has not been adulterated or extended with chemicals of any kind (check out Young Living Essential Oils).

Heat the cider or juice in a medium size pot with vinegar and calcium water. Bring to a boil. Thoroughly mix the pectin in with the honey and add to the hot juice. Bring just to a boil again and then take pot off the burner. Add one to two drops essential oil and mix thoroughly. Spoon into sterilized jars and process as above.

Let me know how you like it! Enjoy!

The Art and Science of Blending

For tonight's aromatherapy certification class, we will be studying the Art and Science of Blending Essential Oils. Blends may be used for therapeutic purposes, as natural fragrances, or for household uses. Medically, the anti-microbial benefits of blends are reported to be more pronounced than with single oils.

Here is some information on using essential oils for your pleasure, rather than for their therapeutic properties, though happily, one can hardly escape their beneficial effects on one's health.

Perfume Recipes

Firstly we start with the base. You can use alcohol or a carrier oil but a mixture of both is ideal. An odorless spirit such as Vodka is the best choice along with Jojoba. Jojoba has a long shelf life and once it's on the skin it tends to dry out leaving your wonderful scent behind.

As Jojoba is the most expensive carrier oil I recommend that while you are experimenting you use one of the cheaper, odorless carrier oils such as almond oil or apricot kernel oil. Once you are happy with your experimenting, you can then blend using jojoba oil.

Equipment you will need:
Measuring spoons
Small funnel
Small colored bottle

Instructions:

Measure 1 teaspoon of your carrier oil (jojoba, almond or apricot kernel) and 1 teaspoon of alcohol (Vodka), using the small funnel, into your bottle.

Add the essential oils from your chosen recipe one drop at a time. You may need to use a dropper if your essential oil jars do not already have dropper measures built in.

Shake the mixture well after adding each drop.

Put the lid on tightly and store in a cool, dark place for a minimum of 12 days shaking at least 3 times each day.

Enjoy!

Recipes:

Bliss
2 drops Bergamot
1 drops Jasmine
1 drops Rose
2 drops Sandalwood

Joyfulness
2 drops Basil
1 drops Geranium
3 drops Melissa
2 drops Sandalwood

Warmth
2 drops Black Pepper
3 drops Patchouli
4 drops Rosewood
3 drops Ylang Ylang

Poise
2 drops Basil
3 drops Bergamot
1 drop Coriander
4 drops Petitgrain

Decisiveness
2 drops Benzoin
3 drops Frankincense
1 drop Geranium
3 drops Orange

Self belief
2 drops Ginger
3 drops Myrtle
4 drops Rosemary
3 drops Verbena

Wedding nerves
4 drops Jasmine
2 drops Lemon
1 drops Patchouli

Arabian nights
3 drops Coriander
1 drop Frankincense
3 drops Juniper
4 drops Orange

Egyptian empress
2 drops Cinnamon
3 drops Lime
4 drops Rose
5 drops Ylang Ylang

Morocco mystique
3 drops Bergamot
2 drops Palmarosa
3 drops Rose
4 drops Sandalwood

Perfumes will smell different on different people and on different skin types; don't be disappointed if you don't like them all. Experimenting with these recipes is all part of the fun. You can always give them away to a friend as a gift!

All recipes from www.essential-oil-recipes.com.

Brandied Cherries with Cinnamon Bark

Here's a great recipe for something unusual and quick you can make with fruit from the Farmer's Market. The recipe calls for cherries, but I had enough liquid left over to make a small jar of brandied apricots, too. I plan to use the cherries and apricots on top of honey vanilla ice cream, but the recipe says to use them in cocktails instead of marachino cherries.

One drop of cinnamon bark essential oil is plenty to give you just the right amount of spice. I dropped it onto a spoon before mixing it into the warm, honey liquid, that way, if more than one drop came out, I wouldn't have an overly spiced jar of cherries!

Enjoy!

BRANDIED CHERRIES

1 lb pitted Ranier cherries (or a mixture of black cherries and Ranier)

1 cinnamon stick (about 3” long) or 1 drop cinnamon bark essential oil

1 ¼ C honey

1 cup brandy

1 C spring water

Put cherries and cinnamon stick (if using) into a 1 qt sealable glass container, such as a mason jar.

Warm honey, brandy, and water in a small saucepan until the honey is thoroughly dissolved. Add one drop cinnamon bark essential oil (if using instead of the cinnamon stick).

Pour liquid over cherries and let cool to room temperature (1 or 2 hours).

Seal jar and chill until cherries have shrunk and absorbed liquid, and are flavorful, at least one month and up to 4 months.

Brandied cherries and apricots.

Lavender Time!

It’s that time of year again: Lavender is budding and blooming in the lower elevations, and preparing to burst forth in the foothills. The bees are delirious with joy and drunk with pollen.

It’s time for the aromatherapy class I teach to take their field trip to The Lavender Farm in Lincoln next month, or perhaps at the beginning of July, depending upon when plants are in full bloom and distillation of essential oils begins. I’d love for them to witness a lavender distillation (especially Lavandula angustifolia, also known as English lavender). Lesa Hertel, of The Lavender Farm, will demonstrate distillation techniques, teach us how to make wreaths and wands, and tell us the history of her farm.

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Shh! Here’s a secret recipe for Lavender Shortbread Cookies. I am baking some today to take to this Wednesday’s Aromatherapy certification class at Sutter Downtown Hospital in Sacramento, CA. (We are studying Essential Oil Safety this month.) Unless they read this blog, or unless you spill the beans, it should be a nice little surprise treat. Here’s the recipe for you to try:

Honey Lavender Shortbread

Makes 30 cookies

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour (or unbleached white)

¾ tsp salt (sea salt)

½ tsp baking powder

1 TBsp dried or fresh lavender buds

6 oz unsalted butter (organic), softened

2 TBsp honey

½ cup confectioner’s sugar (organic)

Procedure:

1. Combine flour, salt, baking powder, and lavender in a medium bowl.

2. Using an electric mixer, cream the butter, honey, and sugar in a large bowl. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.

3. Spoon dough out onto a large rectangle of parchment paper to form a log. Transfer dough to refrigerator and chill until firm, about 1-2 hours.

4. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut the log of dough into ½ inch slices. Place the slices on sheet, spacing them about 2 inches apart, and bake 8 minutes, or until light golden brown.

The recipe is from www.seriouseats.com/recipes . The author obtained it from chef Tina Casaceli at Milk and Cookies Bakery in West Village, Manhattan. (Suggestions in parentheses in the recipe are mine.)

Another way to enjoy lavender:

Scent of a Nation

(Omani Frankincense)

For millennia, the frankincense produced in Oman’s Dhofar region brought great riches to the country. And now its proving to be a valuable asset for its tourism industry. Olivia Edward reports in the March issue of Geographical:

 

My guide takes his knife and draws it sharply across the bark of a frankincense tree. Within seconds, a rather toxic-looking white substance has bubbled to the surface, like beads of blood surging up along a paper cut.

‘Taste it, taste it,’ says guide Abdullah Subah. I’m not sure that I want to. It looks pretty noxious, but Subah insists it’s perfectly harmless, so I scoop up a little with my finger. It feels a bit like the white glue children use at playgroups. And tastes a bit like it, too, but with an added tinge of tongue-numbing antiseptic and a smell like concentrated pine oil.

We’re standing in a wadi (valley) in the Dhofar region in Oman’s southwestern corner. Whereas most of Oman is subject to the sand-baking heat of the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, a small part of Dhofar is lush and green, moistened annually by the monsoon rains that rise up of out the Arabian Sea. Some frankincense grows down there by the sea, but the best grows just over the hills where the rains don’t quite make it.

Here, where we are, the jade vegetation and duvet of grey mist are replaced by fierce winds, persistent camels and groves of thick-skinned frankincense trees, spritzed by the early-morning mists that spill over the dusty hilltops. The locals have been harvesting the wild Boswellia sacra’s precious resin here for centuries, these days mostly for its incense-like odour, but also to make the most of its various health benefits. Talk to nearly any Omani and they’ll reel off a long list of them: fly repeller, stomach soother, cough remover, blood thinner, cold drier, wound cleaner, joint oiler.

Further up the empty valley, we meet a small group of Bedouin who’ve brought their camels down from the mountains to protect them from the monsoon. The contemplative beasts are corralled in rusty-iron-fenced enclosures, shaded from the sun by garish Arabian carpets. Inside a nearby tent, an uncle, his nephew and their Pakistani helper wait out the noonday heat with lounging mats and large bottles of mineral water.

‘We used to use frankincense as an antiseptic when the camels cut themselves,’ says the uncle, a handsome septuagenarian with pure-white hair, creamy walnut-coloured skin, sea-blue eyes and teeth that would be the envy of a Hollywood A-lister. ‘We would dissolve the frankincense in hot water and smooth it over the animal’s skin. We don’t now of course – we have medicine. But we used it up until the 1980s.’ I ask if he misses those times, and riding his camels across the desert. ‘No,’ he says with a smile as he points at the 4x4 parked outside the tent.

National smell
The traditional aroma of frankincense pervades almost every part of Omani life; if the country had a national smell, this would surely be it. Since ousting his father in a coup in 1970, Sultan Qaboos, the ruler of Oman, has endeavoured to tie the country’s national identity with frankincense, and Oman’s tourism industry has also been working to exploit this ancient association.

We visit Salalah’s old souk in the evening and find that they’re doing a brisk trade. Amid stalls selling kufiya – the head scarves favoured by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – reems of bold floral-print material and stuffed birds of prey stuck in awkward, embarrassed poses are apothecary-like shops filled with jars and jars of different types of frankincense.

A group of young men rushes into one of the most popular shops, where they order different types of frankincense mixed with other aromatic ingredients, such as rosewater, sandalwood or cardamom. ‘They’re from the capital, Muscat,’ explains the shopkeeper as he seals each medley in a small metal tin. ‘Fulfilling perfume requests for friends and wives and sisters and mothers.’

Away from the fluorescent lights, in the souk’s quieter areas, older women with traditional gold rings in their noses sort lumps of recently harvested frankincense into different baskets depending on their quality. The best is greenish-white, its resin globules looking like hardened lumps of ectoplasm that might glow if the lights were switched off. Nearby, other trays contain inferior yellowish nuggets and ‘contaminated’ lumps that contain pieces of tree bark. ‘For burning,’ explain the women.

The quality of the frankincense is dependent on where and when it’s harvested, and where on the tree the cuts were made. Harvesting takes place from April to September, during which time villagers looking to supplement their incomes head out to the wadis to score the trees, rights to which are owned by different tribes or families.

Leaving the white gummy resin to bubble up and dry, they return a couple of weeks later, by which time hardened lumps of resin known as ‘tears’ have formed above the cuts. After collection, these are given another fortnight of drying time before being sent off for sale.

The frankincense obtained from the first tapping is considered to be of lower quality, as is resin gathered from cuts made low down on the tree. The highest-grade frankincense, known as hojari, is valued for its clear, lemony aroma. It’s harvested from trees located just outside the monsoon regions, scored at the hottest time of the year.

Ancient trade
Much of the resin purchased at the market will be burned in ceramic burners, very similar in design to those found at Omani archaeological sites that date back to before Islam arrived during the seventh century. Back then, Oman was a wealthy trading nation, ideally located between India and Greece. The Greeks referred to the coast as Omana, but the central importance of one commodity to trade in the area led to it being widely known as the ‘frankincense coast’.

The next day, we travel along this frankincense coast to the recently excavated ancient city of Sumhuram. About two millennia ago, Sumhuram was a thriving port built on the back of the frankincense trade, with two-storey houses, rich traders, skilled artisans and the sea splashing up against its thick sandstone sea walls.

The sea retreated a long time ago, and today its remains sit atop a crumbling cliff looking out over a lagoon. Below us, flamingoes mooch about in the water and, as if arranged especially for our visit, a string of camels ambles across the distant lagoon entrance, silhouetted against the cool sea mist.

Sumhuram is one of a cluster of archaeological sites in Dhofar that were inscribed onto the World Heritage list in 2000, due to their links with the ancient frankincense trade. The large number of bronze and iron objects discovered during excavations of the site give some indication of the places in northern Oman and south Arabia with which its inhabitants would have traded, while huge storerooms demonstrate the scale of the trade in frankincense resin at the time. The resin would have been brought down from the hills on the back of camels, before being shipped off around the region in wooden dhows.

Cancer cure
Today, although about 7,000 tonnes of frankincense is produced annually, selling for around US$78million, only about 10–12 tonnes is exported. But that may be about to change. A local doctor, in collaboration with an international team, has discovered that frankincense seems to have an extraordinary effect on cancer cells.

Sitting beside me in a hotel lobby, Dr Mahmoud Suhail, an Iraqi paedia­trician currently living and working in Salalah, explains how it all works by gliding through diagrams on his iPad. ‘Essentially, it reprogrammes the nucleus so that it no longer believes it’s a cancer cell, and the surrounding cell is then destroyed,’ he says. ‘It’s like reformatting a computer.’

In his spare time, Suhail travels around the Dhofar region, collecting frankincense samples using a variety of different extraction methods, before sending them to Dr HK Lin, an associate professor of urology at the University of Oklahoma. Lin has already tested the substance on pancreatic, bladder and breast cancer cells, and the results have been very positive.

‘We’re pretty sure that it will be more helpful to cancer patients than most drugs currently available. And personally, I think that it will be more helpful to cancer patients than all current anti-cancer drugs,’ says Suhail. ‘It’s a huge discovery. Nobody has done this before – changed the DNA of cancer cells. It could be as revolutionary as the discovery of penicillin.’

Lin is rather more circumspect but still clearly very optimistic. ‘Based on our exploratory experiments, frankincense might be a useful therapeutic agent against multiple types of cancer,’ he says. So far, all of the testing has been done on cell cultures. ‘We need to repeat our results in pre-clinical (animal) studies. [This will] give us information about the safety and toxicity of frankincense,’ says Lin.

The low levels of cancer among the Omani population suggest that the researchers may well be on to something. ‘We examined around 40 patients a day, six days a week, 12 months of the year, and we only saw one cancer case in 2010 and three the year before,’ says Suhail.

National government figures seem to back up this trend. In the USA, about 48.5 people per 10,000 develop cancer annually; in Oman, the rate is seven people per 10,000. The disparity is difficult to explain. ‘[People in Oman] don’t exercise much, they smoke, they have bad eating habits. It’s difficult to know exactly what causes the low incidence of cancer, but it could be because of their use of frankincense. It’s still very prevalent here,’ says Suhail.

The use of frankincense to treat cancer also has historical precedent. ‘This is ancient knowledge,’ says Suhail. ‘Thousands of years ago, they were doing this. An 11th-century Arab doctor called Avicenna was the first. He treated melanoma [a form of skin cancer] with frankincense.’

As ancient people discovered more and more about frankincense’s health-giving properties, and demand for the resin increased, many tried to take trees and grow them elsewhere. ‘But it doesn’t work,’ says Suhail. ‘There are trees from Oman now growing in Somalia and India, but their chemical properties have changed. Here they grow just right. The limestone soil and the early-morning mist combine to create the perfect conditions. It means Oman really does produce the best frankincense in the world.’

Oman co-ordinates

When to go
The khareef or monsoon season typically lasts from June until early September. During this time, the mountainous regions of Dhofar are green and lush, and the air is filled with a fine mist. Frankincense harvesting can be witnessed between April and September, but doesn’t take place during Ramadan.

Getting there
Oman Air (www.omanair.com) flies daily from London Heathrow to Muscat in about eight hours, and offers connecting flights to Salalah, which take just over one and a half hours.

Further information
To learn more about visiting Oman, check out www.omantourism.gov.om. Further information about research into the medical uses of frankincense can be found at www.sacredfrankincense.com.