What is Yin Zhi Huang anyway?

January 03, 2004

West sees cure for jaundice in tea leaves
By A Correspondent



A CHINESE herbal tea used in Asia to treat jaundice in newborn babies really works, an American team has found. Better still, they know why.
Many herbal remedies contain powerful ingredients and there is no doubt that some, at least, are effective. Western medicine has not adopted them because they contain such a mass of different components that it is difficult to know which is the most important. They cannot be patented, either, so there is little economic incentive to carry out trials.


A team at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, studied a herbal tea called Yin Zhi Huang, made from Artemisia capillaris and three other herbs. Teas with these ingredients are prescribed for jaundice by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.

Jaundice 〞 from the French jaune (yellow) 〞 is common among the newborn. The yellow skin comes from an excess of the pigment bilirubin, made when red blood cells are broken down. The babies have a lot of red blood cells and make a lot of bilirubin, which is processed by the liver before being excreted.

In jaundiced babies an excess of red blood cells or an immature liver causes bilirubin to accumulate in the tissues, including the skin. Very occasionally, jaundice can lead to more serious problems, including brain damage. Normally, it clears up, but it can be treated by phytotherapy 〞 placing the baby under bright lights that break down bilirubin in the skin into chemicals that are more easily excreted.

The team at Baylor, led by Dr David Moore, have identified a protein on the surface of liver cells as a key regulator of bilirubin clearance. The more active that this constitutive androstane receptor (CAR) is, the more quickly bilirubin is cleared.

The team report in The Journal of Clinical Investigation that in mice, three days of feeding with herbal tea accelerated the clearance of bilirubin injected into the bloodstream. The same applied to mice genetically engineered to carry the human CAR gene, but not to those lacking the gene. That showed that CAR is important in clearing bilirubin, and that herbal tea improves its performance.

Experiments showed that the tea＊s active ingredient is a compound called 6,7-dimethylesculetin. When synthesised chemically, it has the same anti-jaundice effect 〞 making it the vital substance in the tea.

In the journal Dr Mitchell Lazar, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, calls the research ※a wonderful example of knowledge gained by applying the Western scientific method to an Eastern herbal remedy§.