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Green Tea May Aid Liver Disease Patients
By Liza Jane Maltin
April 23, 2002
It's already been connected to inhibiting factors that increase the risk of
heart disease and cancer, and now there's evidence that the miracle brew --
green tea -- may help prevent transplant failure in people with liver failure.
Right now, there are far more people in need of a liver transplant than there
are suitable donor livers. The problem is that donor organs usually become
available due to accidents, and quite often, accidents involve alcohol. Livers
subjected to excess alcohol are not good candidates for transplantation. They
are too fatty -- full of dangerous free radicals that make them susceptible to
transplant failure, which can kill the recipient.
Free radicals are naturally produced in the body, and antioxidants help get
rid of them.
Zhi Zhong, PhD, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
colleagues looked at whether the powerful, free-radical scavenging antioxidants
in green tea could alleviate some of the problems associated with fatty livers.
First, the researchers reproduced alcohol abuse in rats. After a bout of
"binge drinking," the drunken rats were put to sleep and their livers removed.
These fatty livers spent 24 hours in cold storage, and then some of them were
bathed in a solution containing green tea extract. The team then transplanted a
group of rats with these seemingly unfit organs and others with normal, healthy
livers.
Only 13% of the rats that received untreated fatty livers survived, compared
with 88% of those that received healthy livers. In contrast, survival rate was
bumped up to 77% for rats that received a fatty liver bathed in green tea
extract.
Green tea extract scavenges harmful free radicals in fatty livers and
therefore could be an effective treatment to prevent failure of liver
transplants, according to the researchers.
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