{"publication_id":"2ed54f5a-fbc9-45ec-8fa9-5be79af12b17","screening":{"identified":61,"screened":61,"excluded":0,"included":61,"included_or_retained":61,"flow":["identified","screened","excluded_with_reasons","included"],"wording":"61 candidate receipts retained after source retrieval, deduplication, and topic filtering. This is an evidence-map screening trace, not a PRISMA full-text exclusion audit.","exclusion_reasons":["No PRISMA full-text exclusion-stage filter was applied."]},"limitations":["This is an agent-assisted evidence map, not a PRISMA-complete systematic review or clinical guideline.","It is not PROSPERO-registered and should not be read as medical advice.","Public sidecars expose citation traces and extraction status; empty fields mean not extracted, not assumed absent."],"contradictions":["However, the evidence base is heterogeneous; some trials report null effects on immune markers (Saleh 2025) or on neuropathic outcomes in diabetic patients (Mansour 2025), highlighting the importance of context and condition.","The evidence profile indicates that while curcumin demonstrates anti-inflammatory and cardiometabolic effects in specific clinical contexts, its role in combating systemic inflammaging remains incomplete and conditional on factors like bioavailability and population.","Global population aging has accelerated interest in interventions that might compress the period of morbidity at the end of life rather than merely extending chronological years. The distinction between lifespan and healthspan is central to this conversation: a therapy that adds years without preserving functional independence may simply shift the burden of disability to later dates. Chronic low-grade inflammation, often termed inflammaging, has been proposed as a unifying mechanism linking age-related declines in muscle strength, cardiometabolic health, and cognitive function. If inflammaging is indeed a tractable driver of multimorbidity, then pharmacological or nutraceutical agents that modulate inflammatory signaling could theoretically delay or attenuate multiple age-related phenotypes simultaneously. Curcumin inflammaging—the use of curcumin or turmeric-derived preparations to target inflammatory processes in the context of aging—has emerged as one such candidate, generating both scientific enthusiasm and considerable skepticism. The question of whether Curcumin inflammaging can meaningfully improve healthspan in older adults remains unresolved, and the urgency of answering it grows as the global population aged 60 and over is projected to reach approximately one-third of total demographics by mid-century. This introduction frames the clinical stakes, the mechanistic rationale, the current human evidence landscape, and the specific contributions of the present synthesis.","The human randomized controlled trial landscape for Curcumin inflammaging spans a remarkably broad range of clinical contexts, from type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, postmenopausal symptoms, and cognitive aging. Multiple systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been published in recent years, including umbrella reviews evaluating the totality of curcumin evidence across health outcomes (Xu 2025) and focused meta-analyses of lipid profiles (Unhapipatpong 2025), anthropometric indices in diabetes (Baniasadi 2025), rheumatoid arthritis disease activity (Fan 2026), and cognitive function (Wang 2025). Within the present corpus, positive effect directions have been reported for cardiometabolic endpoints including improvements in triglycerides, total cholesterol, and blood pressure in diabetic populations (Baniasadi 2025; Bahari 2025), and for functional endpoints such as reduced gastrointestinal symptoms in women with severe obesity (Kattah 2025). Immune and inflammatory endpoints show a particularly mixed profile, with some trials reporting significant reductions in pro-inflammatory cytokines (Yaikwawong 2026) and others finding no effect on inflammatory biomarkers (Lazou-Ahren 2024; Saleh 2025). The evidence base as a whole appears to support the conclusion that Curcumin inflammaging has a context-dependent profile, with the strongest signals in cardiometabolic and anti-inflammatory domains but persistent uncertainty regarding effect magnitude, durability, and clinical meaningfulness.","Several unresolved questions complicate the translational trajectory of Curcumin inflammaging from bench to bedside. First, the mechanism-to-function translation gap remains wide: preclinical models consistently demonstrate NF-κB inhibition and downstream anti-inflammatory effects, yet human trials frequently report null or inconsistent findings on the same biomarkers, raising the question of whether Curcumin inflammaging achieves sufficient target engagement in vivo or whether the mechanistic story is incomplete. Second, dose-response relationships are poorly characterized; the present corpus includes trials administering doses ranging from 80 mg/day of nano-curcumin (Gerami 2025) to 1500 mg of hydrolyzed curcumin (Helder 2025), with no systematic evidence identifying an optimal therapeutic window. Third, the duration of most trials—typically 8 to 16 weeks—is short relative to the chronicity of inflammaging as a biological process, raising the possibility that longer interventions might be required to observe clinically meaningful effects on healthspan-relevant endpoints. Tradeoffs also merit consideration: curcumin's safety profile is generally favorable, but the absence of long-term safety data in older adult populations, combined with the potential for drug-supplement interactions in polypharmacy regimens, warrants cautious interpretation. The tension between curcumin's accessibility and the rigor of evidence supporting its use in aging populations appears to be a defining feature of the field as currently constituted.","The present synthesis contributes to this landscape by applying a structured evidence-weighting framework that explicitly separates clinical outcome evidence from mechanistic and preclinical data, a distinction that has been insufficiently maintained in prior reviews of Curcumin inflammaging. Across 61 curated reference papers, the evidence base reveals a pattern of cross-outcome tensions: positive signals in cardiometabolic and dosing-pharmacokinetic domains coexist with negative or null findings in immune and inflammatory endpoints, creating cross-study disagreements across outcome classes that are tabulated in the accompanying Cross-Domain Synthesis. This structured approach enables readers to evaluate whether apparent inconsistencies reflect true biological heterogeneity, methodological limitations, or publication bias, rather than accepting surface-level aggregations of effect sizes at face value. We also address the gap between clinical and mechanistic evidence by mapping trial-level findings against proposed molecular mechanisms, identifying domains where mechanistic plausibility is strong but clinical translation has been disappointing, and vice versa. The synthesis further highlights areas of population specificity, where Curcumin inflammaging may perform differently in older adults with prediabetes versus younger adults with rheumatoid arthritis, and identifies dose and formulation as critical moderating variables that future trials should systematically investigate. Ultimately, the Curcumin inflammaging case for anti-aging benefit remains incomplete: mechanistic plausibility coexists with mixed or sparse human-RCT evidence, and the boundary conditions—dose, duration, formulation, population, and target outcome—remain to be rigorously established. This synthesis is intended to provide the structured evidence base necessary for rational clinical trial design and regulatory evaluation in this rapidly evolving field.","Several methodological challenges complicate the interpretation of Curcumin inflammaging evidence and define the boundary conditions for future research. First, the heterogeneity of curcumin formulations across trials—including turmeric powder, standardized extracts, nano-curcumin, phospholipid complexes, and hydrolyzed preparations at doses ranging from 80 mg/day (Gerami 2025) to 1500 mg/day (Helder 2025)—renders cross-trial comparison difficult and may explain discordant findings within the same disease population. Second, intervention durations across the evidence base span from as short as 4 weeks to 12 months (Zeng 2022), and the optimal treatment period for modulating inflammaging biomarkers—particularly in older adults, who are underrepresented in most trials—remains undefined. Third, many curcumin trials combine supplementation with concurrent lifestyle interventions such as resistance training (Flensted-Jensen 2025, Flensted-Jensen 2025b) or dietary modifications (Bourbour 2025, Sukatta 2025), making it impossible to isolate the independent anti-inflammatory contribution of curcumin itself. Finally, the cross-study disagreement map of the present evidence synthesis reveals cross-study disagreements across outcome classes, with particularly pronounced disagreements in the immune and dosing-pharmacokinetics domains—underscoring that the Curcumin inflammaging hypothesis, while biologically plausible, has not yet achieved the evidentiary consistency required to support clinical recommendations for aging populations.","Mechanistically, the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant pathways implicated in curcumin's cardiometabolic effects align with broader inflammaging biology. Yaikwawong 2025b specifically identified attenuation of liver steatosis through antioxidant and anti-inflammatory pathways in obese patients with T2DM, providing a direct mechanistic link between curcumin supplementation and hepatic lipid metabolism. The convergence of these mechanistic human studies and preclinical data supports biological plausibility for curcumin's cardiometabolic effects, though the specific contribution of curcumin versus other polyphenols requires further delineation.","The curated evidence base encompasses a broad array of clinical contexts in which curcumin's anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties have been evaluated. Multiple systematic reviews and meta-analyses synthesize findings across rheumatoid arthritis, oral lichen planus, postmenopausal symptoms, metabolic syndrome, osteoarthritis, ulcerative colitis, and Parkinson's disease models (Fan 2026, AlMaweri 2025, Akyakar 2025, Fang 2025, Wang 2025b, Pang 2026). A critical umbrella review by Xu 2025 assessed curcumin across multiple health outcomes in adults aged ≥18 years, encompassing both patient and healthy populations. Direct clinical trial evidence includes a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial (NCT04946981) evaluating turmeric formulation effects on muscle soreness and function recovery in 44 moderately active adults (Schonenberger 2025). The breadth of these contexts reflects the pleiotropic mechanisms attributed to curcumin, yet simultaneously complicates efforts to draw unified conclusions about its efficacy for inflammaging specifically.","Within the corpus, notable tensions emerge between studies reporting positive or mixed findings and those yielding null or unclear results. The systematic review of curcumin for rheumatoid arthritis by Fan 2026 (mixed effect direction) reports highly significant pooled effects, whereas Liu 2025 found no significant effect of curcumin on inflammatory biomarkers in RA and SLE patients, representing a direct disagreement within the autoimmune inflammation domain. These discrepancies across tension pairs highlight that curcumin's clinical benefit remains context-dependent, with formulation, dosage, and disease state as critical moderators of observed efficacy."]}