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["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

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From: ARS News Service <NewsService@ars.usda.gov>
Reply-To: ARS News Service <NewsService@ars.usda.gov>
Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 07:42:06 -0400
To: ARS News subscriber <lonrom@hevanet.com>
Subject: Got Arthritis? Fresh Cherries May Help

STORY LEAD:
Got Arthritis? Fresh Cherries May Help
___________________________________________

ARS News Service
Agricultural Research Service, USDA
Marcia Wood, (301) 504-1662, MarciaWood@ars.usda.gov
May 7, 2004
___________________________________________

Plump, juicy Bing cherries, eaten fresh, may help people who suffer
from the pain of gout or other forms of arthritic inflammation. That's
according to preliminary results from research at the Agricultural
Research Service's Western Human Nutrition Research Center in Davis,
Calif. 

The 10 healthy women, aged 22 to 40, who volunteered for the first
phase of this research ate a special breakfast of 45 fresh, pitted Bing
cherries. 

ARS chemists Robert A. Jacob (now retired) and Darshan S. Kelley
collaborated with university scientists in that preliminary study and,
recently, in a more extensive follow-up investigation.

The experiments are among the first to track anti-inflammatory effects
of fresh Bing cherries in carefully controlled tests with healthy
volunteers. That's in contrast to previous studies, conducted elsewhere,
in which scientists analyzed extracts from sweet or tart cherries in the
laboratory. 

Jacob and Kelley found that levels of uric acid--a compound the body
uses to form painful urate crystals during a gout attack--decreased
significantly in volunteers' blood (plasma) over the 5 hours after they
ate the Bing-cherry breakfast.

And, levels of urate removed from their bodies in urine increased over
those 5 hours. 

The decrease in two key markers, or indicators, of inflammation--nitric
oxide and C reactive protein--weren't large enough to be statistically
significant. However, this downward trend agreed with that noted earlier
in other scientists' test-tube studies of cherry extracts.

The cherry-breakfast study, reported last year in the Journal of
Nutrition, paved the way for the California scientists' longer,
follow-up study of more markers in samples from more volunteers--18
women and two men, aged 22 to 40, who ate a total of 45 cherries
throughout the day for several weeks.

Findings from this newer investigation should be available later this
year. Read more about the research in Agricultural Research magazine,
available online at:
 http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/may04/cherry0504.htm

The grower-sponsored California Cherry Advisory Board, Lodi, Calif.,
helped fund the research. ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
chief scientific research agency.
___________________________________________

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