GLEN ALLEN, Va., June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Star
Scientific, Inc. (NASDAQ: CIGX) announced today that the results of
a successful animal study supporting the potential thyroid benefit
of nutritional supplementation with Rock Creek Pharmaceuticals'
anatabine supplement, Anatabloc®, were presented on Tuesday, June 26, in Houston, Texas, at ENDO 2012, the annual
international meeting of the Endocrine Society.
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The independently funded research team at Johns Hopkins conducted and completed a study of
anatabine nutritional supplementation in a mouse model of
autoimmune thyroiditis, entitled "Anatabine, a Tobacco Alkaloid,
Reduces Disease Incidence and Severity in a Mouse Model of
Autoimmune Thyroiditis."
Studies performed in the immunopathology laboratory of Dr.
Patrizio Caturegli utilized female
mice, placing half of them on dietary supplementation (drinking
water) with anatabine, and the other half on plain water. All mice
were injected with mouse thyroglobulin in Freund's adjuvant, a
procedure that reliably induces autoimmune thyroiditis with
histopathological features and thyroid gland dysfunction similar to
Hashimoto's thyroiditis in humans.
Anatabine dietary supplementation significantly reduced the
incidence and severity of experimental autoimmune thyroiditis.
Thirty-one of thirty-two control mice developed thyroiditis (97%),
as compared with twenty-one of twenty-nine (72%) anatabine treated
mice (P