Ginseng has been used as one of herb medicines and vital-additive drugs for long time. After the reports suggesting that ginseng has the anti-cancer effect. There were many other studies for the anti-cancer effect of ginseng and its mechanisms.
The
anticancer effect of ginseng is explainable by two mechanisms. One is direct cancer cell killing effect of some components of ginseng, and the other is reinforcement of immune functions of hosts, especially immune surveillance mechanisms.
Authors performed long-term administration of ginseng to the patients with gastric cancer who had undergone curative surgery to analyse the effect of ginseng on the subjective symptoms, immune and nutritional status.
To know the clinical anticancer effect of ginseng, authors randomly selected 39 patients with curative operation for gastric cancer. All the patients received postoperative adjuvant immunochemotherapy; the twenty patients classified as the study
group
received 5400 mg of red ginseng everyday for two years postoperatively, and the 19 patients of control group had follow-up only. For both groups of patients, authors compared the preoperative and postoperative changes of appetite, body weight to
height
ratio, triceps skinfold thickness, serum protein, albumon and transferrin level, percentage of lymphocyte and T-cell percentage in peripheral blood. Although our data does not show that the long-term administration of ginseng into gastric cancer
patients with curative resection improved the nutritional status, it was suggested that it would mmprove subjecti ve symptoms and immune functions, and prevent postoperative recurrences.
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