Andrographis Beneficial for Common Cold
A randomised, double blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial has found that treatment with a standardised extract of Andrographis paniculata reduced the symptoms of uncomplicated upper respiratory tract infection.
A total of 223 patients received either 200 mg/day of an Andrographis extract (about 2.5 g of herb containing 60 mg of andrographolides) or a matching placebo for 5 days after experiencing the typical symptoms of a common cold.
Nine selfevaluated symptoms were used to assess the efficacy of the herbal treatment: cough, expectoration, nasal discharge, headache, fever, sore throat, earache, malaise/fatigue and sleep disturbance.
Both groups showed improvement in these scores from days 1 to 3. However, from days 3 to 5 most of the symptoms in the placebo group were unchanged, whereas symptom improvement continued for the Andrographis group. The difference in the overall symptom score between the two groups was significant at day 5 (p £ 0.05). Looking at the individual symptoms on day 5, all were significantly improved for the Andrographis group versus placebo (p £ 0.05) except for earache.
The overall efficacy of Andrographis was a significant 2.1 times higher than placebo (p £ 0.05), and the herbal treatment was well tolerated.
Comment -
This study provides further clinical evidence to support the role of Andrographis in the management of winter infections. One weakness of the trial design was that patients were not treated for longer than 5 days. Hence the impact of Andrographis on shortening the duration of the common cold could not be assessed.
Reference
Saxena RC, Singh R, Kumar P et al. Phytomed 2010; 17(3-4):178-185