Health & Medicine - Posted by Bill Hathaway-Yale on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 17:14 - 1 Comment 
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...Chinese herbs ease chemo side effects
A combination of four herbs tested on mice reduced toxicity of chemotherapy by multiple mechanisms, including the inhibiting inflammation and promoting the creation of new intestinal cells. This cannot be accomplished by current drugs, which usually target only one mechanism. (Credit: iStockphoto)
YALE (US)—A combination of Chinese herbs in use for more than 1,800 years reduced the gastrointestinal side effects of chemotherapy in mice, while actually enhancing the effects of the cancer treatment, researchers report.
Share this article
Email
Republish this article
The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The formula used in the experiment consists of four herbs, called PHY906, and is based on a herbal recipe called Huang Qin Tang, used historically to treat nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
The study, published August 18 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, asked whether the use of the formula could reduce gastrointestinal effects of a common chemotherapy drug without affecting its ability to kill cancerous cells.
Chemotherapy causes a number of toxic side effects, which are usually treated with several different drugs with mixed success.
“Chemotherapy causes great distress for millions of patients, but PHY906 has multiple biologically active compounds which can act on multiple sources of discomfort,” says Yung-Chi “Tommy” Cheng, a pharmacology professor at Yale University and senior author of the paper.
Mice undergoing chemotherapy that were given PHY906 lost less weight and experienced more anti-tumor activity than mice not given the formula.
The herbal formula reduced toxicity of the chemotherapy by multiple mechanisms, including the inhibiting inflammation and promoting the creation of new intestinal cells. This cannot be accomplished by current drugs, which usually target only one mechanism.
“This combination of chemotherapy and herbs represents a marriage of Western and Eastern approaches to the treatment of cancer,” Cheng says.
Cheng is the co-discover of PHY906 and, with Yale, has a financial interest in PhytoCeutica Inc., a New Haven company developing the formula.
The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
More news from Yale: www.opa.yale.edu
Please wait
1 Comment
Bill Clinton
TCM: traditional chinese medicine needs to enter the 21st century.
true / false real / fake…. is TCM real medicine or just voodoo medicine from the prmative past.
Experiment. Trials. Publication. TCM needs to be subjected to
1. Experiment.
2. Publication. Internet publication so we can all see the results.
Modern science needs to be applied to TCM… Publication so the whole world can examine the results.
True / False.. world will be better place with TCM in the 21s. century