The Effects of <i>Echinacea</i> Root Extract in Plasmacytoma-Bearing Mice: Enhancement of Non-Specific Immunity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alternative and complementary therapies, involving a host of herbal products are becoming increasingly popular. Information on such treatments is anecdotal for the most part, poorly understood, and lacks adequate preclinical and/or clinical empirical substantiation. Formal, controlled, laboratory studies on the effects of herbs on cells responsible for disease defense (granulocytes, natural killer cells, monocytes, lymphocytes) in pathogenic conditions in vivo, are, to date, almost completely lacking. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of long-term dietary administration of the herb, Echinacea, on these cell populations in the spleen and bone marrow of mice while bearing a plasmacytoma, known as a highly immunotoxic tumor. Mice in the present study, were given 4 pristane injections (days 0, 21, 42, and 100) to establish plasmacytoma, and the herb was provided daily in the chow from day 49 (above) until the day of sampling. At the time of euthanasia, the absolute numbers of granulocytes, natural killer (NK) cells, monocytes and lymphocytes, were recorded in both the spleen (a organ housing the mature, functional forms of theses cells), and the bone marrow (generation site of these cells). NK cells are responsible for host innate (nonspecific) immunity and represent the first line of defense against a wide variety of pathogens. The results revealed quantitative, cell lineage-specific changes in both organs in plasmacytoma-bearing mice consuming Echinacea-treated diets versus those consuming the control diet (untreated chow). Echinacea in the diet neutralized the inhibitory effects which the tumor's presence had on the absolute numbers of NK cells in both organs, returning them to control (normal) levels. This study provides the first evidence that NK cells, in vivo, in the presence of a chronic pathological condition, that is, an established tumor, react very positively to Echinacea, and may provide a means of immune support in the immunotoxic environment of chemotherapy administered chronically to tumor-afflicted humans.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".