leukemia symptoms

Green tea may help treat a form of adulthood leukemia. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, found that of four patients who started drinking green tea or taking green tea extracts, three showed clear improvements in their condition in the following months. The patients all had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, a form of leukemia that usually arises during or after middle-age and typically progresses slowly. Like all types of leukemia, chronic lymphocytic leukemia is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, in which abnormal white blood cells replace healthy blood cells. What's particularly interesting about these four cases, according to Dr. Tait Shanafelt, is that the patients all started using green tea on their own, after hearing media reports about a lab study Shanafelt and his colleagues conducted. That study showed that one compound found in green tea, known as EGCG, was able to kill cancer cells that were taken from chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients and put in a test tube with the tea compound. After the findings were published, the doctors became aware of four chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients at their center who had started using green tea products and seemed to be doing better. In interviewing the patients and reviewing their records, the doctors found that three showed signs of a regression in their cancer after they started to drink green tea or take green tea capsules. The fourth had an improvement in her white blood cell count, though her disease remained unchanged by standard criteria. In one case, the patient had been showing progressive swelling in her lymph nodes - one of the characteristics of chronic lymphocytic leukemia - before she starting taking green tea capsules twice a day. Over the next year, her lymph nodes steadily decreased in size. These cases alone cannot prove that green tea or its extracts conferred the benefits. An answer to that question, he said, awaits the outcome of an ongoing clinical trial he is leading. The study, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, is testing the effects of a purified EGCG extract in treating chronic lymphocytic leukemia. SOURCE: Leukemia Research, online December 1, 2005.

by Ray Sahelian, M.D.