Pycnogenol And Polypill - The One-size-fits-all Treatments

Remember the Polypill? It's the pharmaceutical (still in the development stage) designed to prevent some of the symptoms associated with heart disease. In a previous e-Alert I told you about the planned contents for the Polypill: a statin drug to lower cholesterol, three different drugs (including an ACE inhibitor) to control blood pressure, a low dose of aspirin, and folic acid to
reduce homocysteine levels.

The Polypill developers envision a super pill that would be prescribed to everyone over the age of 55. That's right: everyone - even if you don't have high blood pressure, high LDL cholesterol, or any other indications of heart problems.

For those who avoid taking drugs except when absolutely necessary, this one-size-fits-all concept is ludicrous. What makes it truly scary is that it was touted in the British Medical Journal as one of the most important developments in the past 50 years.

But now the Polypill has competition from an all-natural source that's worlds safer than a bubbling cauldron of expensive drugs.

Tall claims
Pycnogenol is a pine bark extract harvested from a coastal forest in southwest France. A natural antioxidant, Pycnogenol contains a variety of polyphenols that have been shown to have anti-inflammatory effects that may provide a wide range of protection to the cardiovascular system.

A review of Pycnogenol research appears in the premier issue of the new journal Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine. Ronald Watson, Ph.D., (a research professor at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Centre in the US) makes the case that Pycnogenol, 'has the potential to counteract all important cardiovascular risk factors simultaneously.'

That's a pretty tall claim - just as tall as the Polypill claims. The difference is that, while the Polypill's benefits are only theory, Pycnogenol trials have already shown that supplements of the extract may improve blood circulation, relax artery constriction and reduce platelet activity - all with a minimum of side effects.

Smokin'
Some of the research on Pycnogenol has been conducted by Dr. Watson himself. In a 1999 trial reported in Thrombosis Research, Dr. Watson's Arizona Prevention Centre team tested the effects of Pycnogenol against aspirin with a group of 38 cigarette smokers.

Smokers were used in the study because smoking increases the dangerous aggregation of blood platelets (the clumping together of blood platelets that can lead to potentially fatal blood clots), providing the researchers with a way to assess how aggregation might be affected.

Subjects were given either 500 mg of aspirin, or 125 mg of Pycnogenol. After taking their doses, subjects smoked in order to increase the clumping of blood platelets. Within two hours, blood was drawn from each subject to evaluate platelet aggregation.

With both Pycnogenol and aspirin, platelet aggregation was significantly reduced. The primary difference between the two agents is that aspirin can cause gastrointestinal bleeding.

The new 'wonder drug'?
In another study, 30 subjects were given Pycnogenol, while 10 were given placebo. When compared with the placebo group, those in the Pycnogenol group had significant reduction in venous pressure, capillary leakage and blood vessel inflammation.

Researchers concluded that Pycnogenol should be recommended for the prevention and treatment of chronic venous insufficiency (a condition which causes blood to pool in the veins of the lower legs, causing ankles and calves to become swollen, achy, tired and heavy feeling). This research also reported no danger of side effects or changes in blood biochemistry.

More to come
As I've expressed in previous e-Alerts, be suspicious of any treatments - natural or pharmaceutical - that claim to be cure-alls or insist one-size-fits-all. So while the reports on Pycnogenol are clearly promising, more testing needs to be done before we can regard it as an across-the-board preventive for heart disease.

I'll continue to keep an eye out for further Pycnogenol studies, which I'm sure we'll see many of in the coming years, and will report on them in the e-Alerts.