Written by Angeline A. De Leon, Staff Writer. This study suggests that fenugreek could be used as an adjuvant therapy in the treatment of adults with mild asthma.
According to recent estimates, about 300 million people suffer from asthma worldwide 1. A growing number of patients continue to seek asthma relief from medicines other than conventional corticosteroids, a synthetic drug used to treat inflamed areas of the body 2. In fact, one report suggests that about 60% of patients experiment with alternative medicine for the treatment of asthma 3. In Traditional Persian Medicine, Trigonella foenum-graceum (fenugreek), a clover-like herb native to the Mediterranean region, is one of the most common treatments for asthma 4. Fenugreek seeds are known to improve breathing and lung secretion, even helping to clear the voice 5. Abundant in polyphenols 6 , fenugreek seeds also possess powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties 7, which are thought to play a role in the protection of airways against oxidative stress 8. Despite its popularity in traditional medicine, to date, there have been no randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of fenugreek in the treatment of asthma. Therefore, in a 2018 study published in Allergy Asthma and Clinical Immunology, researchers conducted a preliminary investigation looking at the impact of fenugreek seed extract in adults with mild asthma.
Using a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group study design, researchers enrolled a total of 79 participants (aged 20 to 70 years) who were diagnosed with mild asthma and were not currently taking alternative medicines for their condition. Patients were randomly and alternately assigned to one of three groups in which they received 10 ml of fenugreek (an aqueous extract of fenugreek seeds based on Traditional Persian Medicine formula), honey, or placebo twice daily for 4 weeks. At baseline and at the end of the study, St. George’s Respiratory Questionnaire (measuring quality of life) and the Asthma Symptom Control questionnaire were administered and blood samples collected to measure serum levels of interleukin-4 (IL-4, cytokine involved in inflammation of airways). Lung function tests were also conducted, assessing forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1), peak expiratory flow (PEF), and maximal expiratory flow rate (MEF).
At the end of 4 weeks, ACT score was significantly improved in the fenugreek (p < 0.01) and honey (p < 0.01) groups, and St. George Respiratory total score was found to be higher in the fenugreek group relative to (p < 0.001) and honey (p = 0.002). At the end of the study, significant improvements were also observed for the fenugreek group on PEF 12.70) and MEF parameters of the lung function test (p < 0.05 for both). Finally, mean levels of Il-4 were seen to significantly improve in the fenugreek group, compared to honey (p = 0.002) and placebo (p < 0.001).
General findings suggest that fenugreek seed extract is effective in reducing serum cytokine Il-4 levels associated with asthma, as well as improving lung function and quality of life in patients with mild asthma. Results support the traditional use of fenugreek as a lung tonic 6 and confirm its anti-inflammatory properties 8 in the first study of fenugreek as a direct treatment for asthma. Key limitations of the study are its relatively small sample size and short treatment duration. Further studies are warranted to overcome these limitations, and it would be helpful to directly compare the efficacy of fenugreek against corticosteroids. Given the beneficial effects of honey in the current study, it would also be interesting to examine whether a combined formulation of fenugreek and honey could produce a stronger clinical effect in the treatment of asthma.
Source: Emitiazy M, Oveidzadeh L, Habibi M, et al. Investigating the effectiveness of the Trigonella foenum-graecum L. (fenugreek) seeds in mild asthma: a randomized controlled trial. Allergy Asthma Clin Immunol. 2018; 14: 19. DOI: 10.1186/s13223-018-0238-9.
© The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Posted July 8, 2019.
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