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Headlines:
Current status of the
Plant Medicine project
- June 2008
Beetroot significantly reduces
blood pressure - January 2008
Aloe vera - a treatment for mouth ulcers
- January 2008
A new
herb for mild to moderate depression? - December 2007
China seeks to improve plant medicine quality
- May 2007
The use of comfrey to
treat osteoarthritis - January 2007
Chilli peppers shown to shrink
tumours
- November 2006

Current status of the
Plant Medicine project
- June 2008
The EXTRACT database has been constructed over almost 20 years, in
the last 4 years much accelerated with the support of a
Foundation in the USA. Data input is in the hands of a team of university
graduates with clinical knowledge of the field in the UK, USA, and Australia. Our
resources and expert base include the pioneering ESCOP monographs, produced
by a cross-European team of researchers for submission to the European
Medicines Agency, adverse reaction reports to European regulators, and the
first Master of Science programme in the USA. We
expect to release the database for expert review in the last months of 2008 with up to 80 herbs to be covered in the first phase. This
website is being offered as a taster during the launch phase. There will be gaps
in the coverage in the early stages but these will be reduced.
The
EXTRACT database uses Microsoft Access. This in turn has been prepared for the web by the Distance Learning Unit
at the School for Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Exeter,
England.
The site uses Active Server Pages (ASP) and Structured Query Language (SQL)
to query the Access file. The result is displayed in HTML templates as
familiar searchable web pages. This website offers free digests of the many
thousands of graded scientific papers whose abstracts are on the EXTRACT
database. Access to the database itself will be by personal or institutional
subscription, for students on linked educational programmes, and by arrangement
for reviewers and by physicians needing immediate access to the evidence base.
For further information about accessing EXTRACT contact us.
A demonstration 10-credit postgraduate level educational module, on
plant-drug interactions and combinations, has also been developed with
the Tai Sophia Institute in Maryland. It is linked to the EXTRACT database. This and future modules will be designed to
enable students to explore the database as they go through the learning material
and in particular to help them complete assignments. The demonstration module is created within the
Web
CT learning environment. This provides the module material in an accessible format and includes a
discussion forum, live chat and many other tools and utilities to enhance
learning.
The priorities in the coming year will be to
finalise database records on the first tranche of most popular herbs, to
integrate the texts for the
next series of teaching modules with the database pages and to extend the materia medica to cover Ayurvedic remedies.
Plant-Medicine
has been incorporated as a
social enterprise corporation,
the Plant Medicine Community Interest Company, with assets locked to the non-profit
Tai Sophia Institute for the |Healing Arts in Maryland USA and dividends to shareholders capped.. A
UK
educational base will
be developed
with links to another new charity Living Medicine.
The
following section will contain relevant news stories on plant
medicines.
Beetroot
significantly reduces blood pressure
- January 2008
Drinking 500ml of
beetroot juice daily can significantly reduce high blood pressure according to a
study by Barts, The London School of Medicine and the Peninsula Medical School.
The report in Hypertension states that although it only took an hour after
consumption to note a drop in blood pressure, reductions were more acute after
three to four hours. The beneficial ingredient appears to be a nitrate.
The researchers showed that
nitrate in the juice is converted in saliva, by bacteria on the tongue, into
nitrite. This nitrite-containing saliva is swallowed, and in the acidic
environment of the stomach is either converted into nitric oxide or re-enters
the circulation as nitrite.
Webb AJ, Patel N,
Loukogeorgakis S, Okorie M, Aboud Z, Misra S, Rashid R, Miall P, Deanfield J,
Benjamin N, Macallister R, Hobbs AJ, Ahluwalia A. 2008 Feb 4. Acute Blood
Pressure Lowering, Vasoprotective, and Antiplatelet Properties of Dietary
Nitrate via Bioconversion to Nitrite.
Hypertension
Aloe Vera - a treatment for mouth
ulcers
- January 2008
Aloe vera is an effective
treatment for a skin disorder oral lichen planus and could be used to
treat common mouth ulcers. A group of Thai dermatologists found that in
a group of 54 patients suffering with oral lichen planus (a chronic
inflammatory disorder of the mouth), those treated with aloe vera as
opposed to the placebo showed great improvement. 81% of the patients
treated with aloe vera had a good response after eight weeks, while only
4% of placebo patients had a similar response.
Choonhakarn
C, Busaracome P, Sripanidkulchai B, Sarakarn P.2007. The efficacy of
aloe vera gel in the treatment of oral lichen planus: a randomized
controlled trial.Br
J Dermatol. 2007 Dec 11.
A
new herb for mild to moderate depression? - December 2007
The American Botanical
Council http://www.herbalgram.org/ has
reported on a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical
trial in Sweden on an extract of Rhodiola
rosea roots
and rhizomes ('SHR-5') that demonstrated anti-depressive activity in
patients with mild to moderate depression. The 6-week trial was
conducted on 89 subjects, aged 18 to 70, who were assessed with
clinically significant depression according to two different standard
measurements used in psychiatry. Patients were randomly assigned to one
of three groups. The first group received 2 tablets once daily (340
mg/day) of SHR-5, the second group received 2 tablets twice daily (680
mg/day) of SHR-5, and the third group was given 2 placebo tablets once
daily. Following treatment, both groups given SHR-5 experienced
statistically significant declines in average scores compared to
placebo. At both dosage levels of SHR-5, people experienced
statistically significant improvements in insomnia, emotional
instability and anxiety-related physical symptoms, compared to
insignificant changes in the placebo group. The trial was published in
the Nordic
Journal of Psychiatry.
China has announced a five-year offensive to try
and restore confidence in its drugs at home and abroad. The administration
launched a nationwide campaign yesterday on drug safety inspection, sending a
total of 90 officials to 15 provinces over two weeks to oversee standards in
both traditional plant drug and food manufacture.
For
example a published survey by the quality inspection administration revealed
that a third of China's 450,000 food production companies were unlicensed. An
overwhelming 60 percent of these companies did not have any quality control
mechanism in place, while some 29 percent of them had no "quality labels" on
their products. The country's main quality control agency announced this week
its first recall system of unsafe products..
The
country is only now drafting its first national law on food and drug safety,
which has been part of legislative deliberations since 2003. But even if the
National People's Congress, China's parliament, approves the law by the end of
this year as planned, there remains a question about which agency would be put
in charge of its implementation. Currently, a dozen or so government watchdogs
are responsible for supervising the industry with hundreds of individual safety
laws already on the books.
A double-blind placebo-controlled bicentre
clinical trial has shown that the external application of proprietary comfrey
ointment Kyatta-Salbe reduced pain and increased mobility in knees affected by
chronic osteoarthritis.
Grube B,
Grunwald J,
Krug L,
Staiger C.
2006. Efficacy of a comfrey root (Symphyti offic. radix) extract ointment in the
treatment of patients with painful osteoarthritis of the knee: Results of a
double-blind, randomised, bicenter, placebo-controlled trial.
Phytomedicine. 2007 Jan
10;14(1):2-10.
Chilli peppers shown to
shrink tumours
- November 2006
Chilli
peppers have long been used as a traditional remedy for the treatment of
colds and flu as well as to relieve nasal congestion. However, recent
research at the University of California and the University of
Pittsburgh have found that capsaicin, the 'hot' part of the chilli,
helped to kill off cancer cells and reduce the size of tumours in both
pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer.
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