The Effects of Chronic Kava Usage on Physical Health and Psychological Health in Pacific Males Residing in Auckland, New Zealand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: \nKava (Piper methysticum) has a variety of uses that originate from traditional consumption \nobserved in the Pacific Islands. More recently, kava has been widely used to treat anxiety and \nother health conditions as opposed to mainstream medications. While seemingly successful, \nacute use research has mainly focussed on populations outside of the Pacific that use herbal \nsupplements. Regular (chronic) kava use is not very well understood, and particularly the \nconsequences for health. Scarce research has made it difficult to examine its influence. \nAim: The following exploratory study aimed to assess the effects of chronic kava use on both \nphysical (Cardiac health, weight loss/gain perception, liver health, physical activity and \ndermopathy) and psychological (anxiety, mood and cognitive function) aspects of health in \nPacific males living in Auckland, New Zealand. This was undertaken to better gauge the \nmagnitude of effect presented by chronic use on the health of long-term Pacific consumers. \nMethod: Using a cross-sectional survey based on a scoping literature review, a questionnaire \nbattery was created to measure both physical and psychological health conditions. Participants \nwere 45 males aged from 18-65 years of age, who resided in Auckland, and who consumed \nvarying amounts of kava (current, previous and none/rare consumers). These group were then \ncompared across varying health measures. A total of 9 health categories was assessed using the \nAlcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, a shortened version of the New Zealand Health \nSurvey, the Chronic Liver Disease Questionnaire, The Skin Complaints Questionnaire, the \nHamilton Anxiety Rating Scale and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment tool. These \nquestionnaires were then assessed to determine the effect of kava use on each health category. \nResults: The findings from the survey largely indicated few differences across levels of kava \nconsumption on health effect across each group. General practice and hospital attendance was \nhigh in the respondents, but emergency service use tended to be relatively low. A large \nproportion of participants were non-smokers, non-users of illicit drugs, and non-users of \nprescription medication. Over half of respondents did however consume alcohol. Chi-square \nanalysis found no association between several categorical variables. Group comparisons \nshowed no significance findings across groups, apart from a significance difference in liver \nhealth and dermopathy scores in the current kava group compared to other groups. \nConclusion: This study found that regular (chronic) kava use had minimal effect across several \ncategories of health. Each assessment indicated that long-term kava use was not associated \nwith detrimental effects on a variety of health conditions. While these results add to the growing \nliterature that suggests kava may be a relatively harmless herbal beverage and provide further \nsocial and health benefits, this study has many limitations that limit the generalizability of the \nresults. Given the scarcity of chronic research and for potential risks unexplored in this study, \nmore controlled clinical trials and research are needed to explore the effects of long-term kava \nuse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".