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Led the first human randomized controlled trial of a standardized Eucommia bark extract for blood-pressure reduction.

Story

Greenway is professor of clinical medicine at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center and an internationally known clinical-trial specialist in obesity and metabolic disease. Noting Eucommia's antihypertensive tradition in East Asia and earlier uncontrolled Russian clinical reports, he built on rat safety studies and, with ethics approval, conducted the first controlled human trial of Eucommia in Western subjects.

The trial used an aqueous Eucommia bark extract standardized to PDG, demonstrating mild blood-pressure reduction with beta-blocker-like activity, concluding that 'Eucommia may serve as a nutritional intervention for prehypertension.' This was the first time Eucommia entered Euro-American academic view through modern evidence-based medicine; indexed in PubMed, it has been universally cited in Eucommia reviews across countries.

Milestones

• 2011 Led and completed the human clinical trial of Eucommia bark extract (Pennington Center, Baton Rouge, USA)
• In parallel completed a 28-day repeated-dose toxicity study in rats, confirming the extract's safety
• Earlier confirmed the extract's antihypertensive efficacy in SHR rat experiments, paving the way for human trials

Key Contributions

• In 2011 published in Alternative Medicine Review a controlled human clinical trial of a standardized Eucommia bark extract (8% pinoresinol diglucoside) for hypertension
• The trial showed that 1 g three times daily for two weeks lowered blood pressure by an average of 7.5/3.9 mmHg (P<0.008), with good tolerability
• Found that the Eucommia extract has beta-adrenergic blocking activity, proposing Eucommia as a nutritional intervention for prehypertension
• Cited over 70 times, the paper is the key clinical document through which Western medicine came to know Eucommia's antihypertensive effect