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Using ginkgo leaf supplements is likely to be a waste of time and money. There is however good evidence for a highly concentrated patented extract of Ginkgo biloba in relieving circulatory problems and symptoms of ageing and dementia. It has been a very widely prescribed drug in Europe. Ginkgo has been claimed to cause bleeding problems or to interact with warfarin or aspirin: there is actually little evidence for this.
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
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.The American Botanical Council
China seeks to improve plant medicine quality - May 2007
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.
The use of comfrey ointment to treat osteoarthritis - January 2007
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.
