Comment · Tue, December 17, 2024 · ND Owner
Noopept is a constituent of Pinellia ternata?
Original post in this thread
ArcticPlatypus · 7 points
I was researching the traditional Chinese herb Pinellia ternata, being curious about its antinausea properties as a potential 5-HT3 antagonist like ginger. However I noticed in the research article listing identified constituents of the plant, a glaring word: “Noopept”. I have previously tried to identify if Noopept or other compounds like racetams have ever been identified in natural sources, but never stumbled across anything until today.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10696046/
This is found in table 2 of the results section of this paper.
My thought is that if noopept has been identified naturally, it could be marketed as a dietary supplement even if produced synthetically, similar to Berberine HCL sometimes not being a plant extract and rather is synthesized.
What they were answering
ArcticPlatypus · 1 points
Very curious what the incentive is for researchers to fabricate stuff like this. For instance the whole article goes very in depth about the effects of this plant and never even mentions the noopept other than in that table, so why would they put it in there and go to the hassle of making a fake citation? Is it conflict of interest from researchers who have stake in supplement companies? I’m just trying to wrap my head around how this stuff makes it into papers and why. I figure your team has encountered stuff like this before.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
This literally happens all the time. Most people don't actually go track down the citations and make sure the papers say what the first paper said they did. I have been making a point to do that the past few years, and shit is really bad. I am finding it all the time in papers when I try to track down the original source for some claims. Sometimes it is like citationception. One paper will make a claim, and cite paper B for it. Then I find paper B, and that claim says it, but they cite paper C. I track down paper C, and lo and behold... that claim is not found anywhere in the paper at all. So sometimes the fake info goes multiple levels deep. One time I had to go 4 levels deep before the trail of that data point ended. It's insane to me, but I am seeing it all the time now. Then you have the more common issue of misinterpretation. Sometimes you will see a paper making a claim, then track down the paper they are citing for that claim. Then you read that paper, and you can see it is talking about that claim. However, if you read the full thing, you can see that they are just misinterpreting the first paper's statements. So while not just completely making a data point up, they are stretching the conclusions of another paper to make their claim. Then some other paper in the future might cite the second paper's claim, and the game of telephone starts.
Why does this happen? Probably for a number of reasons. Researchers are really pressured to publish, so a lot of this boils down to the fact that they need to get papers out to reach their publishing targets. It's easier to massage the data to do that, or just make it up. It can certainly be conflicts of interest in some cases, but most often it is likely just someone trying to fit data enough to their conclusions to get published. This is one of the big reasons I have built the organization that I have. I don't trust anyone or anything anymore, unless I can personally oversee the process and data. There is too much lies and fraud out there, and when we try to replicate a lot of this shit we read in studies in our lab, we find out that we can't. A lot of those efforts so far have been on the analytical chemistry side. I built a lab to be able to verify a lot of these claims, like X plant has a certain compound in it, or a certain active is only found in a specific part of the mushroom. However, till this point I have not been able to verify more of the pharmacodynamic/pharmacokinetic claims in papers. That is going to be changing soon, though! We are in the process of building out a cell culture lab at our facility. I just bought us a Sartorius SX5 system.
That's going to allow us to do cell culture research on various human cells, and prove how different products/actives affect certain cells around the body. The SX5 is the top of the end version. The reason I went with that one is that it is not only capable of doing human neuronal growth assays, but it will also do neuronal activity assays as well!
This is going to allow us to prove specific activity in different human cells. We know that erinacine-A increases neuronal growth based on the available research out there, but we have to trust the data from the authors of the studies that published that research. However, soon we will be able to replicate this data in the lab ourselves. Imagine showing Erinamax increases growth of human neuronal cells directly. Imagine showing ebelin lactone from Cognance increases neuronal activity in cultured brain cells. Imagine being able to quantify the relative antioxidant or anti-inflammatory properties of two different products, or in specific human cells. We are going to be the only supplement company in the world that will be doing our own human cell culture studies. I am pretty excited about it!