3.10 Curcumin
Curcumin is the main active ingredient of Curcuma longa L. and is
mainly extracted from dried powdered turmeric. There is evidence that
curcumin can modulate the inflammatory response and alleviate
inflammatory diseases like atherosclerosis (F. Y. Chen et al., 2015;
Hasan et al., 2014). Studies found that the activated miR-126-3p from
endothelial cells and VSMCs played a key role in reducing vascular
calcification (Zeng et al., 2021) and curcumin upregulates miR-126-3p
expression (S. Li et al., 2021). Therefore, we infer that miR-126-3p may
be one of the targets of curcumin in the treatment of atherosclerosis.
LncRNA MIAT has been shown to aggravate the atherosclerotic damage
through the activation of PI3K/Akt signaling pathway (G. Sun, Li, & Ji,
2019). A study found that reduced expression of MIAT contributes to the
protective effect of curcumin on atherosclerosis. MIAT regulates miR-124
by interacting with enhancer of
zeste homolog 2 (EZH2), thereby altering endothelial cell apoptosis and
proliferation (Ouyang, Zhang, Xiang, Yao, & Fang, 2022). In addition,
curcumin markedly suppresses miR-125a-5p and upregulates SIRT6 in
macrophages, thereby regulating the ABCA1 expression and promoting
cholesterol efflux of macrophages (C. Tan, Zhou, Wen, & Xiao, 2021).