Study: Echinacea may prevent colds
Jul. 2, 2007

Echinacea may not only help reduce the symptoms of a cold but may help prevent infection with some cold viruses, U.S. researchers said Monday. People who took echinacea had a 58 percent lower risk of catching a cold, according to the researchers, who did not study the herb's effects directly but looked at the results of 14 studies in an approach called a meta-analysis. Dr. Craig Coleman of the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, who led the research, cautioned that the studies involved only 1,600 people. They also involved various echinacea products, so it was still difficult to know for sure whether and how echinacea might work to prevent colds. "All the studies trended toward reducing a patient's odds of developing a cold. But none of them was large enough -- they didn''t have enough patients -- to prove it statistically," said Coleman in a telephone interview. Coleman's study, published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, is one of the few to take a look at the efficacy of echinacea, a widely used product derived from several different species of flower. "Someone needs to do a really large, well-done, randomized trial. That is unlikely to occur because there is a lack of funding," Coleman said. Drug companies cannot patent such a widely used herbal product, he noted.

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