October 2005

NCCAM revises report of echinacea study

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) revised its Web site yesterday to correct erroneous statements it had made previously about a study on low-dose preparations of Echinacea angustifolia root published in the New England Journal of Medicine on July 28, 2005. The revisions were made only one week after the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) requested such corrections in a letter dated October 4, 2005, to Stephen Straus, MD, NCCAM’s director.

A particular grievance voiced in AHPA’s letter to Straus identified as “a gratuitous criticism” NCCAM’s statement about herbal products, specifically, “… what's on the label may not always be what's in the bottle.” That statement has now been removed.

AHPA’s letter also discussed comments that had been attributed to Straus in numerous media reports, some of which appeared to defend the researchers selection of the low dose (900 mg per day) of Echinacea angustifolia root used in the study, and others which dismissed all echinacea products as ineffective, regardless of dose or species.

The revised page on the NCCAM site addresses both of these complaints. For example, a new sentence has been added to acknowledge that “critics of this study believe the dose of E. angustifolia used was too low,” and a concluding sentence on the lack of efficacy found in this research is now careful to identify these findings in the context of “preparations of E. angustifolia at the 900 mg per day dose.” In addition, the revised NCCAM review has completely removed an extensive commentary by Straus, in which he described the recent study as “well-designed” and the low-dose used as “internationally recognized.”

AHPA’s October 4 letter to Straus is available online at the AHPA Web site, at www.ahpa.org/05_1004_LetterToStraus.pdf. The current revision of NCCAM’s review of the recent low-dose Echinacea angustifolia root study can be accessed at nccam.nih.gov/clinicaltrials/echinacea_rr.htm.

Source: The American Herbal Products Association, www.ahpa.org

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