Aiding Chemotherapy Treatment with Ginseng
Written by Nathan Tran
Edited by Emily Moran
Jan 23rd 2022
Edited by Emily Moran
Jan 23rd 2022
Chemotherapy, being one of the few possible treatments cancer patients undergo, aims to fight cancer and prevent its spread. Usually, it is in the form of medication that has been found to combat and obstruct the spread of cancerous cells in the body, which divide and spread unhindered due to mutations or other causes. Those chemotherapy medications must target the mechanisms by which a cell divides and prevent them from doing that in a harmful way. However, such risky treatment does not come without adverse side effects to other parts of the body. One such example is cisplatin, and using it commonly leads to memory impairment and cognitive disability, which are common symptoms in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. If that is the case, what can be done to minimize these side effects when it is a necessary treatment for some patients?
Prior studies have shown an association between ginseng, an herb commonly used in eastern medicine, and a prevention in neuronal damage - which is the underlying cause of many dysfunctional cognitive diseases. Because of that, researchers Mohamed Hussien and Mokhtar Ibrahim Yousef had reasonable speculation to experimentally test ginseng’s protective effects against cisplatin as an antioxidant. They did this by using male rats as models that were separated into four experimental groups, though these rats did not have cancer. The four groups consisted of one group of rats not given anything, one that was given ginseng, one that was given cisplatin, and one that was given both ginseng and cisplatin. It was predicted that there would be less observed neurological damage in rats given cisplatin alongside ginseng compared to cisplatin alone, while the other groups served as standards for comparison to a baseline. Lastly for the study, the researchers had to be able to measure “neurological damage,” which commonly manifests as learning and memory dysfunction. To accomplish this they gave the rats a Morris water maze task, which tests learning, and a rotarod test that tests neurocognition and coordination.
When comparing the results between the groups and their performances in the various tasks, the groups that were given either just ginseng or nothing had the highest scores but those that were given just cisplatin had the lowest. In comparison, the group of rats given cisplatin along with ginseng had higher cognitive-performance scores than the cisplatin group that were statistically significant, though not as high as the control group given nothing. With this established association, the authors further investigated the biological basis behind ginseng’s medicinal effects, before concluding that it served a wide range of purposes of which lowering oxidative stress and neuroinflammation are included.
It is interesting to note how a commonly known herb, ginseng, is found to help combat the adverse side effects of the chemotherapy cisplatin. Perhaps further research can expand on ginseng’s role as a natural antioxidant to manufacture a therapeutic treatment for neurodegenerative symptoms that stem from chemotherapy treatments. Either way, although this study was done using rats as model participants, its findings established ginseng as a potential aid to go along with cisplatin and could benefit cancer patients with more investigation.