My fianc
é, Brian, and I were sitting on the couch Sunday afternoon
enjoying a movie. At one particularly gripping scene, I sniffed,
and a tear rolled down his cheek.
My fiancé, Brian, and I were sitting on the couch Sunday afternoon enjoying a movie. At one particularly gripping scene, I sniffed, and a tear rolled down his cheek.
Someone peering in on our living room might have mistaken this for a romantic moment, but it wasn’t. It was just allergies.
He’s a cats-dust-pollen kind of a person. I’m more the dogs-dust-perfume-pollen-spore-anything-living type. Basically, that means both of us sneeze, wheeze, sniff and snore our way through allergy seasons like fall and spring, just like one in five Americans.
A host of allergy medications are on the market to prevent these reactions, of course. There’s over-the-counter Claritin and Claritin-D. Then there’s prescription-only Allegra, Zyrtec and Flonase. But allergy sufferers could soon be turning to a new source for relief.
In what study organizers are calling the largest trial ever done on the herb butterbur, researchers from Switzerland and Germany found that the plant extract may be an effective alternative in treating allergic rhinitis, commonly known as hay fever. The results of their study were published Aug. 22 in the journal Phytotherapy Research, an international compendium focusing on medicinal plant studies.
Researchers used both professional visits and patient reports to evaluate symptoms of hay fever, including sneezing, nasal congestion and watery or itchy eyes, in 330 patients divided among three study groups. The first took 8 milligram tablets of butterbur three times per day. The second took a single 180 milligram dose of fexofenadine (Allegra) in the morning, and a third group was given placebos.
The patients’ “total symptom score” was calculated on a scale of one to 10 with one being best and 10 being worst. Each group of allergy sufferers started with a 10, but within weeks, their numbers were very different.
Patients in the antihistamine fexofenadine’s group lowered their scores to an average of 6.49, and the butterbur group’s TSS went down to 6.14. The placebo group remained at a score of 9.59.
“Butterbur Ze 339 (the formula used in the study) and Fexofenadine are comparably efficacious relative to placebo,” wrote lead researcher Dr. Andreas Schapowal, an allergy specialist in Landquart, Switzerland, in the study’s abstract. “Despite being a herbal drug, Butterbur Ze 339 has now been subject to a series of well controlled trials and should be considered as an alternative treatment for IAR (intermittent allergic rhinitis).”
And hay fever isn’t the only thing the herb has been in the news for recently. A study released in the Dec. 28 issue of the journal Neurology linked another patented extract of butterbur – the drug Petadolex – to migraine prevention.
Butterbur root, part of a plant found in Europe, Asia and parts of North America, has been used in herbal treatments for centuries, according to HealthCentral.com, but researchers warn that not all butterbur is safe.
Previous research linked butterbur with cancer in animal tests, but these effects were believed to stem from the presence of liver-toxic alkaloids called pyrrolizidines, according to HealthCentral.com. The study’s drug makers filtered pyrrolizidines out of lab-grown butterbur leaves, which contain less than one-tenth the concentration of pyrrolizidine alkaloids found in the plant’s root, the site said.
