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CHINESE HERBS FOR IBS
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Chinese herbal medicine appears to offer improvement
in symptoms of some people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), an Australian study has found.
It is used routinely in China for functional bowel disorders.
There is no single treatment in conventional modern medicine that is consistently reliable and effective.
Professor Alan Bensoussan, associate professor in the Chinese Medicine Unit of the University of Western Sydney, and his colleagues conducted a randomized double-blind placebo controlled trial of 116 patients recruited from two teaching hospitals and five private gastroenterology practices.
Patients were randomly allocated to one of three treatment groups: individualized Chinese herbal formulations, a standard Chinese herbal formulation, or placebo.
Patients received five capsules three times per day for 16 weeks and were evaluated regularly by a traditional Chinese herbalist and a gastroenterologist.
Patients in the active treatment groups had significant improvement in bowel symptom scores as rated by patients and by gastroenterologists and significant global improvement, Professor Bensoussan told a complementary medicine research symposium in Brisbane.
Eleven per cent of patients on placebo reported that treatment significantly reduced the degree of interference with life caused by IBS symptoms, as did 29% on standard treatment and 18% on individualized treatment.
Chinese herbal formulations tailored to individual patients proved no more effective than standard treatment, he said.
Professor Bensoussan said this trial is important because it is the first rigorous trial of Chinese herbal medicine that permits traditional practice (individualization of treatment).
"It is also important because Chinese herbal medicine may represent a further treatment option for lBS sufferers.
"But one of our frustrations has been the tardiness by which the product has been taken up by industry, mainly because it is a complex herbal product."
Some of the ingredients are mandarin peel and magnolia bark, products not normally utilized in the West but traditionally used over centuries in China.
The clinical significance of the outcome was far beyond that of any other currently utilized IBS pharmaceutical, he said.
"So we firmly believe there is a lot of promise in the product, and we need to continue to develop it so that it can meet all the regulatory hurdles that are required with a complex herbal medication.
"This is part of the difficulty of getting herbal medicines onto the shelf - it is very easy if you have a single herb or a combination of two herbs, but as soon as you get to a complex formulation, which is what most of Chinese medicine is about, then it becomes a regulatory nightmare."
The next step is therefore to reduce the size of the formula so that it is manageable in a regulatory framework of the West without compromising either safety or efficacy, hence a second trial will begin later this year, he said.
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