[MPWG] Not Echinacea, But Ginseng??!

[myron hardesty]

ovember 1, 2005

Ginseng May Reduce Number and Severity of Colds

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Ginseng, long recommended as a treatment for colds by proponents of  
herbal medicine, has gained some support in a controlled scientific  
experiment. Canadian researchers tested North American ginseng  
extract against a placebo and found that it had a small but  
significant effect in reducing the number and intensity of colds.

The study, published in the Oct. 25 issue of The Canadian Journal of  
Medicine, tested 323 subjects. Volunteers were randomly assigned  
either to a group that took 200-milligram tablets of a commercial  
product with a known quantity of North American ginseng extract or to  
a group that took identical tablets of rice powder. An independent  
company randomly assigned the subjects, and neither the researchers  
nor the volunteers knew which pills were given to which participants.

The subjects were asked to note their symptoms - runny nose, fever,  
headache, sore throat and six others - and to rank them on a scale  
from 0 (no symptom) to 3 (severe symptom). The participants also kept  
logs of their symptoms, and the researchers called each volunteer  
once a month in the four-month study to make sure that they were  
taking their medicine.

At the end of two months, the subjects returned any unused medicine,  
and they were given a second bottle of pills. They then returned the  
unused amounts from those bottles at the end of the study, which was  
conducted in 2003-2004.

Of those in the placebo group, 23 percent reported two or more colds  
over the winter. Ten percent of the ginseng group had two or more.  
When those in the ginseng group did have colds, their symptoms were  
milder, based on the 0 to 3 rankings, and they had one-third fewer  
days with symptoms than those on the placebo.

The average duration of each cold was also lower in the ginseng  
group, 8.7 days compared with 11.1 days for the placebo group. On  
every measure, the people taking the ginseng did better than those on  
the placebo.

CV Technologies, the manufacturers of the ginseng-based cold  
treatment in the study, provided financial support for the study, but  
had no role in planning its design, collecting data or making  
decisions on preparing the manuscript for publication.

Dr. Tapan Basu, a professor of nutritional biochemistry at the  
University of Alberta and the lead author on the study, emphasized  
that the results pertained only to the standardized product in the  
study, and not to ginseng in general. "This is not the same as a  
bottle of ginseng from just anywhere," Dr. Basu said.

Dr. Ronald B. Turner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of  
Virginia who wrote an editorial accompanying the paper, warned that  
the study was only a first step. "This is an unexpected result," he  
said, "and the proper way to deal with it is to see what happens when  
other people try to confirm it.

"It's premature for the public to take off on this," he said.

The authors acknowledged that ginseng's effects in the study, while  
statistically significant, were still quite modest. They also pointed  
out that their experiment, carried out in flu season, was not set up  
to distinguish a cold from the flu.

Nevertheless, the authors said, the results with ginseng were  
slightly better than those reported with common antiviral drugs.  
North American ginseng extract, they concluded, "appears to be an  
attractive natural prophylactic treatment for upper respiratory tract  
infections."


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