An herbal extract may provide significant symptom relief for heart failure patients

Charles in charge

I admit, this one threw me for a loop at first…

Usually, when I come across someone calling an alternative medicine advocate a “snake oil salesman,” it’s someone in the medical mainstream doing the name-calling.

This time, oddly, the “salesman” accusation comes from Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University in the UK.

But there’s an even bigger surprise here. Prof. Ernst’s target is England’s most high-profile advocate of alternative medicine: Prince Charles.

A couple of years ago, Ernst actually accused Charles of “outright quackery.” In Ernst’s opinion, Charles was promoting unproven therapies.

Well, you know how it is — you can only call the future King of England rude names for so long before you draw uncomfortable attention to yourself. Recently, Ernst was asked to step down from his Exeter post.

I hope someone at the university is planning to continue Ernst’s work. According to Reuters, Ernst led studies that demonstrate the usefulness of several natural therapies, including hypnosis for managing labor pain, St. John’s Wort for mild depression, and hawthorn for the treatment of congestive heart failure.

It’s that last one that jumped out at me. Successfully treating a serious heart condition with an herb is pretty impressive. It isn’t new to me, though. In fact, more than three years ago I told you about this remarkable herbal research.

So as we say adios to Prof. Ernst, this seems like a good time for another look at the powerful hawthorn.

Quality of life

In congestive heart failure, the heart doesn’t sufficiently pump blood. This results in swelling of the ankles and legs, fatigue, shortness of breath, and reduced mobility. And all of that adds up to lower quality of life and risk of death from heart-related complications.

In the Exeter study, Ernst and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 14 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled
trials where CHF patients used extracts of hawthorn leaf and flower, usually as a complementary treatment along with conventional CHF drugs.

Overall, hawthorn intervention significantly improved exercise tolerance and maximal workload, as well as symptoms such as fatigue and shortness of breath.

Adverse side effects were described as “infrequent, mild, and transient.”

In a MedPage Today report about the trial, a CHF specialist at UCLA called hawthorn “not particularly helpful.” He pointed to one of the trials where hawthorn didn’t prevent death associated with cardiac events, and didn’t prevent non-fatal cardiac events.

Now he didn’t come right out and accuse the Exeter team of being snake-oil-selling quacks, but focusing on major heart events misses the point.

The Exeter study shows that many CHF patients may find hawthorn extract to be “particularly helpful” in coping with the day-to-day challenges of their disease. And in at least one of the studies in the Exeter analysis, patients using hawthorn had a 20 percent reduced risk of CHF-related death compared to placebo — a difference that equaled four additional months of survival time.

Obviously, CHF is a very serious condition. So if you or someone you care about is struggling with CHF, you should contact an experienced herbalist to help you design a hawthorn regimen to suit your specific needs.

You can find doctors throughout the U.S. with herbal medicine experience here in the Find a Doc feature on the HSI website.

Sources:
“Professor calls Prince Charles, others ‘snake-oil salesmen'” Kate Kelland, Reuters, 7/25/11, reuters.com

“Hawthorn Extract for Treating Chronic Heart Failure” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2008 Issue 1, mrw.interscience.wiley.com

“Herbal Remedy Deemed Safe and Seemingly Effective in Heart Failure” John Gever, MedPage Today, 1/23/08, medpagetoday.com