Ginko Biloba

hello I'm dr. ken Lando thanks for watching let's talk about ginkgo biloba simply ginkgo it's a very commonly used dietary supplement herbal supplement it's from the fossil tree the maidenhair tree the Japanese silver apricot it's a living fossil actually ginkgo species were identified as early as the Jurassic area more than 250 million years ago with ginkgo biloba being the sole surviving member of the ginkgo acá family ginkgo is among the top 5 herbal supplements actually the dietary supplement market itself sells more than 39 billion dollars of product every single year sales of memory supplements of which ginkgo is one are dramatically increasing in spite of the fact they only account for about 2% of the total supplement market the number of supplements on the market in 1994 was about 4000 now it's more than 80,000 what does ginkgo used for well supposedly ginkgo is a product that might help dementia or forgetfulness or memory loss might improve brain function delay the effects of aging on the brain treat headaches and dizziness and ringing in the ears or tinnitus tree here in problems difficult time concentrating improve your memory improve your circulation if you have peripheral arterial disease treat your asthma or your bronchitis prevent macular degeneration treat anxiety or depression or the tardive dyskinesia that might come along with taking zyprexa or seroquel or similar drugs treat schizophrenia and sexual dysfunction where do you purchase the product well you can get it through health food stores or mail order you can get multilevel marketing organizations grocery stores and pharmacies and the internet the plant itself is native to central China it's highly adaptable it's a hardy tree it's dioecious that means there are separate mail trees and female trees tree begins reproducing after it's been growing for about 20 years the female tree produces fruit that has a distinct bad odor the leaf itself is unique it's by lobe that's been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries grown in China's centrally of course and also in France and in the United States in South Carolina more so than in Australia and Korea Japan and New Zealand its dietary supplement available as a tablet or a capsule or a tea or cosmetic or a powder of the dry leaf or as an extract or a tincture extract with acetone or the tincture with ethanol you can buy ginkgo either by itself or combined with other herbs the leaves contain a complex mixture of components and the exact formulation varies over time and manufacturer but there's a major discrepancy between what's on the label and what's actually in the bottle we have a legal definition of what these supplements contain through the dietary supplement health and education Act in 1994 it's important to realize that in the United States the supplements are regulated completely differently than other medicines so they're not regulated by the FDA like they do the over-the-counter medicines or the prescription medicines actually the federal law does not require the supplements to go through the same safety and efficacy testing that any other chemical that you consume goes through prior to its marketing they simply rely on the word of the manufacturer well that's why you see on all of the supplements the admonition that the product is not meant to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease because it hasn't been tested and because it hasn't been tested you'll have to be very careful giving the product infants are pregnant women or women who are breastfeeding and if you're taking the ginkgo you ought to stop it's at least 24 or 48 hours before you undergo surgery because it might interfere with the coagulation process now some people use the product as food specially the seeds they're regularly consumed in Japan and Korea and China despite poisoning from the seeds gastrointestinal distress and irritability and even grand mal seizures because the seeds contain potentially toxic material cyanide actually cyanogenic glycosides they're potentially poisonous can lead to serious allergic reactions and bleeding in the serotonin syndrome in order to make sense of all of this in Germany physician dr. Willmar schwabe the third 1965 he developed a method of extraction a standardized method of extraction and he developed what's known as eg B 761 that's the international standard for ginkgo and it was subsequently marketed by nature's way as ginkgo and it combines many different components in a unique concentration so it's standardized to contain 24% of the flava and glycosides that includes the Kerr certain and the Kemper all and the ISO Ram name and 6% of the terpene lactones 3% the ginkgo lines and 3% below bolide and then contains a variety of other substances as well like the flavonols and the bio Flav owns that include the catechins at catechins and Gallo catechins and the proanthocyanidins and the alkylphenols and the phenolic acids a whole bunch of other products but also a little bit of ginkgo toxin the toxin again colic acid that has negative effect fortunately it's mostly in the seeds and not so much in the leaves but we can analyze the substance because well none of the products are unique to the ginkgo except for the below bolide and the ginkgo lied and those can be analyzed and it can be analyzed fingerprinted so that it bypasses some of the methods that people use to adulterate the product so you can see whether you're actually getting the correct product well the leaves are harvested only when the flavonol concentration is at its maximum and when the leaves are dried they lose about 75% of the way then they're further extracted with acetone and water and the six to four ratio and then that's concentrated and that's the product that's used now sometimes it's used with an ethanol extraction so you need a large quantity of to produce a small quantity of product and that's why unscrupulous manufacturers substitute inexpensive buckwheat extract or the extract of other plants and then they add chemicals that can fool some of the simple tests for ginkgo that's why you need some special testing well the chemical constituents obviously vary significantly depending on the conditions of growth and the time of the harvest how does it work well no well-established method no really good basic studies but some of the thoughts and the thoughts are common to so many different kind of products it's not to work on the platelet activating factor work as an antioxidant scavenge reactive oxygen radicals or radical species or chelate metal products or work on glutathione transferase or change the concentration of neurotransmitters or their receptors or alter the nitric oxide release or inhibit the mitochondrial dysfunction or maybe work on some of the enzymes in the liver or alter the way amyloid aggregates well all of that's fine but how does it work in the person interestingly study was performed it was printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association or jamon November of 2008 it was called the ginkgo evaluation of memory study and this study was the largest non-industry funded study so an industry studies the product when industry funds the product funds of study then the likelihood of the study turning out positive is relatively high when the government organizations they don't really have a vested interest it's whatever the product shows so the largest non industry funded study looked at individuals who were recruited by advertising these were not people who were in clinic and who were under treatment for anything they were from the community mailing this and voter registration lists study was carried out at the University of Pittsburgh Wake Forest University Johns Hopkins University and University of California Davis funded by the National Institutes of Health National Institutes of aging complementary and alternative medicine branch of the ni a and what they did is they studied for about six years people who were over age 75 average age 79 at entry about 3,000 individuals normal cognition or minimal cognitive impairment at the onset of the study these people did not suffer from depression they did not have psychoses they weren't on any anti-psychotic drugs that he had normal thyroid function their kidneys worked okay they had no packing 'sons disease they weren't taking warfarin so what happened after six years of taking ginkgo compared to a placebo well if we look at any type of dementia the likelihood of developing any type of dimension people taking the gingko was 18% it was only 16% in the people taking the placebo so in other words the likelihood of dementia was 11% less in people taking placebo than people taking the gingko how about Alzheimer's disease specifically well gingko 17% recibo 14% in other words people taking placebo were 15 percent less likely to develop dementia than people who were taking the gingko so if you look at all cause dementia people taking ginkgo 12% more likely to develop dementia Alzheimer's disease people taking ginkgo were 16% more likely to develop dementia people likely to progress from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease 13% more likely if they took ginkgo than if they took a placebo and the people taking the gingko had an increased incidence of hemorrhagic stroke and no reduction in the incidence of cardiovascular disease other studies meta-analysis looked at about 6,000 individuals no change in the rate of development of dementia between ginkgo and placebo and other meta-analysis in 2012 showed the same thing no difference whether you took the SIBO or took ginkgo 2007 again the same thing no difference but the blood pressure no difference macular degeneration no difference polymyositis no difference European Medicines Agency they look ginko and their chairman werner NOS from germany they evaluated the product in 2015 they came to the conclusion that ginkgo could be used to improve age-related cognitive impairment quality of life and adults with mild dementia but they based their conclusions simply on the long-standing use not on any specific medical study or medical evaluation but they said that you should use it only after any serious medical condition was excluded for evidence they use studies that were more than 50 years old were funded by the industry and principally relied on established use and traditional use didn't really have any significant clinical trials well the European Medical Association and medical agency what they did was they say if you're taking the medicine taking the product and you're doing it for dimension if the dementia worsens or you don't have any improvement after three months you want to stop it and if you're taking it for circulatory problem and you've been doing it for two months and you're not getting better or if you're getting worse you ought to stop and see your doctor well in spite of the fact that the European Medicines Agency the EMA said it's okay to use the product there were significant objection by health ministers from Spain and Finland and France and Greece and Italy and Iceland and the Netherlands and Sweden and the United Kingdom they all said no there's no legitimate use for this product Germany the product is an ethical medicine there's a monograph that's composed by Commission II and was set up by the Federal Institute of Health in Germany and they say that there's potential benefit but only if the symptoms are associated with psychopathological and actually they relied on two studies that weren't even done in Western medicine so ginkgo biloba is sold in the United States as a dietary supplement in Germany it's an over-the-counter medicine and a prescription medicine licensed by Commission II they say it's safe and efficacious yes and it contains the Schwabe formula the eg B 761 with the 22 to 27% flavin glycosides and 5 to 7-percent terpene lactones and less than 5 parts per million of the King colic acid far as the safety is concerned well in the study that I mentioned where the government funded it there was no difference in the incidence of adverse effects between the ginkgo and the placebo seems to be safe and moderate amount some people can develop mild headache or nausea constipation or abdominal cream some people develop dizziness or allergic reactions but there might be some problems with bleeding some people spontaneously bleed some people especially if they're taking aspirin or other anticoagulants antiplatelet agents they can bleed into the eye and the nose and the brain and the joints especially if you also add some ginger or some garlic or some ginseng some people even develop some palpitations or allergic skin reactions like poison ivy they're isolated cases where people who take the gingko who have high blood pressure and are taking thiazide get worse or some people develop coma if they happen to be taking trazadone with the gingko and in people taking ginkgo who had previously well controlled seizure sometimes the seizures start to act up again the typical dose is about 120 240 even up to 300 milligrams and divided doses throughout the course of the day the flavonoid glycosides have a half-life of about four and a half hours the below blood and the gingko line have a half-life of about two hours there's some evidence that they might cross the blood-brain barrier interestingly the National Cancer Institute said hey people are taking all these kind of drugs what's the short-term long-term effect of exposure to them they asked the national toxicology program here in the country to evaluate the product so ginkgo was studied in rats and mice for two years they received treatment for up to about 105 weeks was found that those animals receiving the gingko were at higher risk for developing thyroid cancer liver cancer leukemia and abnormalities of nasal mucosa so then the American botanical Council and the American and herbal pharmacopoeia and the University of Missouri so a combination of industry groups and universities came out in 2018 noted that there was economically motivated adulteration of gingko extracts and they noted that that's an ongoing problem in the dietary supplement industry and then you noted that the quality of the supplements has declined ever since 1999 so some of the adulterants might be the pure flavonols or the flavonol glycoside extracts that are improper not using acetone or ethanol but in China actually they found some of the manufacturers were using three percent hydrochloric acid that means that the product didn't contain any curse certain or kemper all or ISO Ram name now the cost of the egb 761 if you buy a pound of it would be about a hundred dollars for a Pam buck week it's less than five dollars a pound and some of the adulterants contain chromium or lead or arsenic so in a evaluation of the product available in the United Kingdom they found that 74 percent contained adulterants or even no Dinko at all in germany basically the same thing canada basically the same thing so the Government Accounting Office the GAO here in the United States in October of 2018 they tested a product that was labeled as ultra pure ginkgo said it would in hints the memory in the brain function and write on the label said it was verified by high performance liquid chromatography and you know what when it was tested didn't contain any ginkgo at all contained other products some of which were unidentified now nationally recognized testing company the consumer lab calm they say finding real ginkgo is very easy and many of the products more than half of the products fail the test and if you look at products that do pass the test the cost of the ginko equivalent amounts anywhere from 9 cents to more than $2 per unit to Center for Science in the public in the street bug interest they urged consumers to avoid the supplements with ginkgo biloba they say they're often adulterated they don't even contain the ginkgo often times Consumer Reports says save your money it's not going to help prevent or treat Alzheimer's disease the Journal of pharmacy and pharmacology they say most of the tested products don't meet the specifications and if we look at reproductive studies none done in humans and in mice we find abnormalities of the chromosomes and the testes and we find decrease pregnancy we find greater pre-implantation loss of fertilized eggs to access story of gingko it's very popular herb been around for hundreds of millions of years but in spite of investigations principally from the industry less so from governmental agency we still don't have any good use for the product good percent of the products actually don't even contain the ginkgo at all and if they do contain something that contains am arsenic and some lemons and chromium but in spite of this the product is still widely used so go figure anyway thanks for watching if you enjoyed the show please tell a friend consider subscribing so you'll be notified when we post new videos and anyway appreciate your interest I'm dr. ken landau [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: wellnowdoctor

Views: 9,345

Rating: 4.7362638 out of 5

Keywords: Ginkgo biloba, herbal supplement, dietary supplement, memory enhancer, improve brain function, Alzheimer's disease, dementia, mild cognitive impairment, flavone glycoside, prevagen, fish oil

Id: llv3XMKR_A4

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019