As we age, our bones lose density and become more fragile, putting us in danger of breaks and fractures. This is especially a concern among post-menopausal women who generally have much greater losses in bone density than men in their age group. Ock Chun, professor of nutritional sciences in UConn's College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR), has been working with blackcurrant, a tart berry, for years, investigating its potential to ameliorate a host of conditions including postmenopausal bone loss and osteoporosis.
Chun previously led a study showing that in mice, blackcurrant supplements helped prevent bone density loss post-menopause. This study showed that the best time for intervention was in the transition between pre- and post-menopause before bone loss has significantly progressed. With these findings in hand, Chun and her team wanted to see if they would translate to a human population.
They recently published their findings demonstrating blackcurrant's protective effects against bone density loss in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry . The group includes nutritional sciences graduate student Briana Nosal, who is the first author on the paper, kinesiology post-doctoral researcher Staci Thornton, and Elaine Choung-Hee Lee, professor of kinesiology, as well as researchers from UConn Health and the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine. Forty peri- and early post-menopausal participants between the ages of 45 and 60 took capsules of blackcurrant.