Jonno's ginkgo + seizures report.

That's a major blunder from the Journal of Analytical Toxicology.

Just a heads-up: Jonno has dissected this paper:
Kupiec T, Raj V.: Fatal seizures due to potential herb-drug interactions with Ginkgo biloba. J Anal Toxicol. 2005 Oct;29(7):755-8. (medline), and concluded that the only thing really acceptable in the paper is that they spelled "Ginkgo" correctly. (Misspelling the plant name is one way to make your research disappear from medline except if you misspell your search term the same way. With Ginkgo/Gingko the results are interesting, though: Ginkgo gives 1708 papers, while Gingko gives 1305 ...).

Here's Jonno's first post on the paper, and here's his rather entertaining review.

Tsk tsk.

There's a lot of irony in the fact that "J Anal Toxicol." means the Journal of Analytical Toxicology. Umm, right ...

Update: Jonno's further posts on the subject:
- If you can blame the herb, why bother blaming the meds, which together have been causing seizures elsewhere?
- the researchers (and their peer reviewers) don't know that the seed of ginkgo is different from the leaf.
- the researchers (and their peer reviewers) don't know their P450 cytochromes.
- Gingko's single constituent bilobalide has in fact been found to lower the risk for seizures in animal tests.
- A summary of all the blunders these folks made.

It's very interesting to see just how far "scientific" medical writers, their peer reviewers, and the editors of the medical "scientific" journals will go in their herb smear campaigns.

The ones responsible for this particular stinker should all be reduced to asking "Would you want fries with that?" in their next job.

And if medical science actually was science they'd get that new job rather soon. Bets, anybody?