Could green tea treat severe sepsis?
A recent paper has been published in which mice with severe sepsis when treated with EGCG, the major antioxidant in green tea, had a significantly lower death rate than controls. Initially I had dismissed it as all hype but on closer examination there may be something to it.
Why should we be sceptical?
Before I get into why this result is potentially interesting I’ll explain why I was (and you should be) initially sceptical. There have been a wide variety of compounds found to be amazingly successful in treating sepsis in animal models when administered prior to the onset of sepsis. Despite this out of 20 clinical trials (involving 10,000 patients) only 5 treatments have been shown to work. Only 2 of the 5 involved medicinal agents. I’ll probably go into more detail on this in a future post but the take home message here is that positive results in animal studies rarely transfer wel to humans.
Reasons for interest
- The dose of EGCG was sensible. A significant increase in survival was seen with 4 mg/kg bodyweight. A cup of green tea contains between 15 and 50 mg so working from my weight (90 kg) it would be equivalent to approx. 11 cups of green tea.
- EGCG was administered after the onset of sepsis. A problem with previous studies has been that a compound is shown to be effective if administered before onset of sepsis but not afterwards. In the clinic administering a compound before sepsis isn’t possible so these compounds have been of no use.
This is a very preliminary study but it is undoubtedly potentially interesting.
Thanks to eatingfabulous.com for prompting me to take a second look at this.
The paper is freely available. Hooray!