Ginseng May Reduce the Duration and Severity of Colds

Here’s Up-To-Date Research Information For Your Good Health

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

The study, published in the October 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 North American Ginseng extract or to a group identical tablets of rice powder (placebo.) An independent company randomly assigned the subjects, and neither the researcher 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, congestion, ect. and to rank them on a scale from 0 (no symptom) to 3 (severe symptom). The participants also kept logs of of their symptoms, and the researchers called each volunteer once a month in the four-month study to make sure 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 colds over the winter. When the people in the Ginseng group did have colds, their symptoms were milder, based on the 0 to 3 rankings, and the had one-thied fewer days with less severe symptoms than those taking the placebo-pill.

The average duration of each cold was also lower in the Ginseng group, 8 days compared with 11 days for the placebo group. On every measure, the people taking the Ginseng did better than those on the placebo.

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.”