Can Common Herbs Extend Your Life?

March 31, 2010 — -- Most Americans have used herbal drugs during the past year, even though in nearly all cases there is no clear scientific evidence that they work. Now, an international team of scientists has found a way to collect that evidence, and even determine which components of very complex compounds are doing the work, and which aren't.

The effort is lead by Yuan Luo, an associate professor in the University of Maryland's department of pharmaceutical science, who grew up in China where many herbal remedies that are used today have been used for thousands of years.

"This provides the first step to find, from all of the hundreds of compounds in herbs, which ones have potential for medicinal purposes. And you can do this very quickly and efficiently," said Laura Dosanjh, a graduate student and coauthor of a paper describing the research in the journal PLoS ONE.

The first results suggest that two very popular herbs, cinnamon and ginseng, can potentially extend lifespan. But that's based on research with the star of this show, a transparent earthworm, C. elegans, which has become a real workhorse in labs around the world because of genetic similarities with higher animals, including humans.

"Nobody is saying this will increase the lifespan in humans, because that research has never been done," Luo said in a telephone interview. But the results in C. elegans are tantalizing. Cinnamon alone was found to increase the lifespan of the worm by up to 14.5 percent.

Luo's technology could help answer questions that have bedeviled health professionals for years. Herbs are medicines, although they have never gone through the clinical trials required for approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

Those trials are very expensive, and pharmaceutical companies that normally pay for the trials have no incentive to do so for herbs that are already on the market because they cannot be patented. Thus, no profit motive leads to very little evidence that any of them work.

What is left is anecdotal evidence from people who have used them and claim to have benefited. That is what has kept the drugs so popular in China for many generations, said Luo, who came to the United States for graduate school and never left.