Kava’s medicinal benefit recognised
19-Jun-2009

The struggle to legitimate the positive health benefits of kava has been long and difficult.

Pacific Islanders have long known its psychosomatic and psychological benefits, but science has taken its time to arrive at the same conclusions.

Germans were the first to scientifically isolate kava’s active ingredients and they have remained at the forefront of kava research for the past 100 years.

European bans on kava products that came into force after a liver-health scare in 2001 placed the drug under the scientific microscope once again.

Following Europe’s example, other western nations similarly banned kava products in 2002.
Their collective negative response naturally adversely affected the Pacific, and especially Fiji’s ability to profit from kava exports.

Kava-apologists subsequently tried a number of strategies to get the Europeans to reconsider their bans, but to no avail until the first International Kava Conference was held in Suva at the end of 2004.

The overwhelming orientation arising out of that conference was the need for more refined clinical trials on aspects of the Pacific drug.

One participant at that conference, Dr Matthias Schmidt, a pharmaceutical consultant on herbal drug safety and member of the International Kava Executive Council, had been one of kava’s most ardent researchers in recent years.

Along with scientists from Munster and Mattsies (Germany), and using Samoan ‘noble’ kava roots (which are rich in kavain-type kavalactones), as well as Vanuatu extracts (which were taken from the higher stem of the plant and which are high in other compounds), Schmidt and his colleagues found an analytical parameter for the definition of acceptable kava quality’.

This was good news for kava growers and exporters seeking to meet the exacting US, EU and UN standards imposed since the 2001 kava scare.

In other significant research, Schmidt and another scientific team from the Universities of Braunschweig and Kaiserslautern tested extracts from Samaoan kava roots and Fijian roots for kava’s supposed hepatotoxic and cytotoxic effects.

Using their laboratory rats and ‘bioactivity-guided investigation’ to help to isolate kava’s alleged toxic properties, their verdict came as a comfort and delight this time to Pacific kava drinkers because, as Schmidt concluded, the kavalactones ‘yangonin, demethoxyyangonin, kavain, methysticin and dehydromethysticin showed no cytotoxic effects in primary rat hepatocytes’.

Vinaka, but as scientific work continued, the problem refocused not on eliminating doubts about the alleged negative effects of kava, but not specifically on demonstrating its positive effects.

That is, while scientists like Schmidt tested kava’s allegedly toxic elements, little clinical research was being carried out to prove its positive, beneficial medicinal and neutrimedical effects.

Consistent with this gap in thinking, German health authorities ruled that their bans on kava were not merely because of the low statistical risk of toxicity, but on the lack of empirical proof of kava’s ‘efficacy in the indication, for stress-related anxiety’.

As a result no kava-ingredient products were licensed for that potentially lucrative market.

That may now change substantially.

An Australian University of Queensland team of researchers led by Jerome Sarris has now found a traditional extract of the drug to be ‘safe and effective in reducing anxiety’.

As published this week in the prestigious scientific journal, Psychopharmacology, the results of their world-first clinical trial found that ‘a water-soluble extract of kava was effective in treating anxiety and improving mood’.

As Sarris puts it, the UQ placebo-controlled study found kava ‘to be an effective and safe treatment option for people with chronic anxiety and varying levels of depression’.

‘We’ve been able to show that kava offers a natural alternative for the treatment of anxiety’, he said, ‘and unlike some pharmaceutical options, has less risk of dependency and less potential of side effects’.

Sarris further states that ‘kava (has) a positive impact on reducing depression levels, something which had not been tested before’.

Referring to the bans in place in Europe, the UK and Canada due to concerns over liver toxicity, Sarris’s message is of further encouragement to Pacific kava growers: ‘When extracted in the appropriate way, kava may pose less or no potential liver problems. I hope the results will encourage governments to reconsider the ban’.

Importantly, the University of Queensland team steered clear of the ethanol and acetone kava extracts, which may have resulted in misleading scientific conclusions in the past and which were sold to European consumers.

As Sarris rightly notes, ‘that is not the traditional way of prescribing kava in the Pacific Islands’.

The potential impact of Sarris’s corrective clinical trials should not be overstated, yet there is now clear scientific ground for asserting what Pacific peoples have always known – moderate kava consumption is medicinal and not just social in function.

Sarris concludes that ‘in addition to benefiting sufferers of anxiety, allowing the sale of kava in Europe, the UK and Canada would significantly enhance Pacific Island economies, which have lost hundreds of millions of dollars by not being able to export the plant over the past several years’.

That is all good news and should sound a fervent taki in all of us as we see science finally coming to better recognise that we in the Pacific have long had the best medicine to meet any upsurge in global psychological depression resulting from global economic depression - kava.