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| |  CCS: Garlic Supplements Lower Lipids Better In Women Than In Men VANCOUVER, B.C. -- November 1, 2000 -- Daily garlic supplements may be much more effective in women than in men, German researchers claim. What’s more, the investigators who conducted the study also claim to have come up with at least a partial explanation as to how garlic exerts its beneficial effect in the first place. The findings were presented this week in an industry-sponsored press conference that took place during the annual meeting of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society, in Vancouver, Canada. According to Dr. Gunter Siegel, a physiologist at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, the four-year study involved 140 people who received placebo and an equal number who received the garlic supplement. Subjects were between the ages of 50-80 and all had at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease -- smoking, diabetes, elevated systolic blood pressure, or elevated LDL-C. In the treatment group, subjects received three 300 mg doses per day of garlic tablets (Kwai LI-III, Lichtwer Pharma, Berlin). Plaque deposits were measured at the common carotid artery and the femoral artery by ultrasound, both at baseline and at four years. Results of the study, which were previously reported in the peer-reviewed journal Atherosclerosis (144 (1999) 237-249) showed significant differences in the way men and women responded to garlic supplements over the study period. Garlic resulted in 75 percent less plaque build-up in women compared to a placebo group, but in only five percent less build-up in men compared to a placebo group. There was also a 14 percent regression in the size of the existing plaque in women as compared with no regression in men. Dr. Siegel, who was one of the authors of the study, said women appear to develop plaque at a much slower rate than men, so at enrollment in the study, men already had larger plaque deposits (a mean of 40 cm/3) than women. He speculated that women are slower to build up plaque because of natural protection afforded by the body’s estrogens, and that once the woman enters menopause, plaque builds up more quickly. With men, on the other hand, he said they build up plaque between the ages of 20-40, but then from 40-60, there is relatively little new plaque development. "Men develop their plaque volume at younger ages, and more gradually, up to the age of 40 years and, therefore, I think it might have been more auspicious to take men into the study a the age of 20-40 instead of 40-50," he said in an interview with Doctor’s Guide. The level of plaque reduction and regression "is an astonishing thing," he commented. "The percentage reduction in plaque in men was not statistically significant, but in women it was highly statistically significant between the placebo group and the study group." The fact that women begin developing plaque at a slower rate than do men suggests that the women in this study had newly-formed plaque. Therefore, the argument might be made that garlic works on "new" plaques, which are still soft, but loses its impact on established plaque which might have already developed hard "caps", or otherwise have hardened in the arteries. In an interview, Dr. Siegel also described how garlic exerts its mechanism of action at the cellular level -- something that has also been published in the peer-reviewed journal International Journal of Angiology (9:129-134 (2000). Garlic, or more particularly allicin (the active ingredient in garlic), works by blocking newly-formed plaque deposits from adhering to the walls of the arterial endothelium. It also has a synergistic effect with high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), which has much the same inhibitory action. "The question is whether, when we have a micro-plaque, we can get rid of it," Dr. Siegel said. In fact, while HDL will dissolve a newly formed micro-plaque deposit by six percent in one half-hour, garlic will dissolve a micro-plaque deposit by 16 percent. "So in one hour we have a 22 percent reduction in newly formed plaques -- this is quite dramatic," he said. Garlic has both a preventive role in inhibiting the process of plaque build-up with the vessel walls, and in particular, in women, a curative role in initiating the reversal of existing plaque deposits, Dr. Siegel said.
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