Thanks for all these links. It is great to see you going into such detail. It is really important to go into the full research behind any study before drawing conclusions. This is especially important if you are going to use the information as part of your health care or treatment.<\/p>\n
I’m don’t have expertise in the biochemistry details of drug development but the olive leaf, astragalus root and green tea studies are all very preliminary studies looking at whether these compounds have activity against HIV in the lab. As with my initial post, any positive findings may be the basis for developing a drug, but this still involves a lot more research, and at any stage, even promising compounds can still fail.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the active ingredient can’t be formulated in a way that the body absorbs, or the test tube results can’t be duplicated in humans. Very commonly, extremely impressive compounds end up with unpredictable side effects that stop the development. This is just as likely to happen with compounds derived from ‘natural’ sources as form those designed based on their chemical structure.<\/p>\n
Many established drugs do come from natural sources. Two famous examples are artemisinin<\/a> for malaria (developed from a Chinese herb) and rifamycin<\/a> an essential TB drug, developed from a natural antibiotic found in a soil sample in France.<\/p>\n This is why environmental issues are important to all of us. We will never know the potential of lost species of plants, animals, bacteria etc once they have gone – and they are being lost at an alarming rate. The best HIV drug could be based on a compound found in a the bark of a tree in the rain forest.<\/p>\n An important caution though is that the source compounds are not active against HIV as a treatment now – they are just potential for research – like thousands of other compounds that may, or may not finally, find a clinical use.<\/p>\n The selenium link is more interesting because it is a well designed study in people with HIV. It is randomised and placebo controlled, both of which are essential to know if there is a real effect. It also has a reasonably large number of participants (although a lot drop out in the study) and it measures viral load and CD4 count.<\/p>\n