OLIVENOL™ livin' Malaysia

Is there a Cure for Psoriasis?

This is Article FIVE in our series on “The Heartbreak of Psoriasis”.

It may be strange for a company marketing OLIVENOL livin’ – a product aimed at psoriasis sufferers – to say this. Unfortunately, there is NO psoriasis cure but there are psoriasis treatments. It is that simple.

Anybody claiming to have a psoriasis cure is misleading and is not able to substantiate with medical evidence. Nothing you do causes psoriasis, it is also that simple.

A psoriasis diet will not magically cure psoriasis, neither will steroids or powerful vitamin derivative type drugs that alter your immune system.

In this article, we offer an unequivocal answer to this single question as we receive many hundreds of emails on our website each month asking us for a psoriasis cure.

These emails are sent by those who have read encouraging reports on the well publicised Tokyo Vascular Institute trial on chronic psoriasis patients conducted by the late Prof Fujio Numano. All psoriasis patients who were on that trial achieved remarkable improvement in their conditions after undergoing OLIVENOL livin’ therapy for twelve months.

Although it may be commercially advantageous to claim credit and associate the results of the Numano study to all psoriasis cases, it would be dishonest and ethically wrong.

The truth is, not every psoriasis patient will benefit from OLIVENOL livin’ taken as adjuvant or adjunctive therapy.

Let us share with you what we DO know and what else we still need to discover.

Psoriasis is an autoimmune problem, a dysfunction of the body’s metabolism, similar to that which occurs in arthritis (psoriasis is often associated with arthritis).

Any treatment, medical or alternative, for psoriasis must first address the imbalance that has occurred in the immune system before lasting benefits can occur.

Many of the drug therapies available carry long lists of scary side effects such as liver or kidney damage, elevation of blood pressure, interactions with other medications, burning or thinning the skin organ, and even cancer.

On the other hand, alternative therapies may be less toxic but their effectiveness is questionable and varies individually. Some sufferers have come to the conclusion that not treating at all is the best option.

There is no cure for psoriasis. The best that a sufferer can realistically hope for is long term remission, where the symptoms seems to fade away. The disease does not have any medically recognised cure.

This does not mean though that there is no hope of a cure in the future.

Psoriasis is frequently referred to as a “T-cell mediated disease.” T cells are a type of immune system cell (white blood cell) that are proven to be very important in the internal process of psoriasis.

If T cells are not activated, the immune response and the cycle of psoriasis never get started. If the T cell becomes activated, an immune response is initiated that leads to the development of skin lesions.

One part of this response includes the release of cytokines. Cytokines are proteins that the immune system uses to communicate messages. In psoriasis, cytokines tell skin cells to reproduce and mature at an accelerated rate. They also set off other reactions, including inflammation, the activation of additional T cells, the recruiting of T cells into the skin and the release or “cascade” of more cytokines.

These T cells are also responsible for a range of skin disorder such as eczema, allergic dermatitis and even certain form of chronic acne.

With the introduction of the new Biologic forms of treatment it is hoped that longer term viable relief can be given to sufferers everywhere. There is optimism in this direction because biologics treatment address the immune system response at the cellular level.

In earlier articles, we highlighted recent scientific discovery that hydroxytyrosol (HT), a natural olive polyphenol, that forms the active ingredient of OLIVENOL livin’ exhibits biologic response modifying function similar to this new class of biologic treatment. (Zhang X, Cao J, Zhong L. Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2009 Jun;379(6):581-6).

This helps explain the positive results in the series of “untold stories” we shared previously on effective relief for arthritic pain (Josie Lim, Julie Ng, KC Chan), eczema (Michelle Shiew), allergic dermatitis (Lisa Lee) and psoriasis (KH Ng, Calvin Lam).

Over the past 18 months, since the introduction of OLIVENOL livin’ in Malaysia at Prince Court Medical Centre, Kuala Lumpur, a large amount of data have been collected in an effort to better understand the effectiveness of the product on psoriasis.

Based on the data compiled, a large majority of psoriasis sufferers achieve positive results with OLIVENOL livin therapy. However there is still a significant minority who do not respond in treatment. No one knows why.

Therefore, despite these anecdotal evidence on the clinical results of OLIVENOL livin’, there is still a need for more conclusive data.

A leading private hospital in Kuala Lumpur conducted an open label trial on psoriasis. The results will be published later this year.

The National Skin Centre (NSC) of Singapore will conduct a controlled trial on 100 psoriasis patients. This trial will commence as soon as the NSC’s ethics committee approves the trial protocol.

At the same time, Triniaire Sdn Bhd, the Malaysian distributor of OLIVENOL livin’ has embarked on an ambitious programme to publicly document the effectiveness OLIVENOL livin’ on volunteer psoriasis sufferers.

Participants in this programme are selected and put on a three months therapy on OLIVENOL livin’. Each participant is required to maintain an online journal of their progress.

You may follow their progress by reading these blogs:

• http://mypsoriasisjournal.blogspot.com
• http://psoriasisfuture.blogspot.com
• http://psoriasisworld.blogspot.com
• http://simon-psoriasis.blogspot.com

By recording and archiving these cases openly, the company hopes to gain further knowledge on the product’s efficacy. If it works, this knowledge is useful. It it does not, or only works under certain limited conditions, at least the boundaries are identified.

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Tags: clinical trial, cure, cytokines, dermatitis, eczema, heartbreak of psoriasis, hydroxytyrosol, inflammation, psoriasis, t-cells, trial