Green tea may help treat a form of adulthood leukemia, if the cases of four patients are any indication, according to a new report carried by Reuters Health. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, found that of four patients who started drinking green tea or taking green tea extracts, three showed clear improvements in their condition in the following months. The patients all had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, a form of leukemia that usually arises during or after middle-age and typically progresses slowly. Like all types of leukemia, CLL is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, in which abnormal white blood cells replace healthy blood cells. What's particularly interesting about these four cases, according to Dr. Tait Shanafelt, is that the patients all started using green tea on their own last year, after hearing media reports about a lab study Shanafelt and his colleagues conducted. That study showed that one compound found in green tea, known as EGCG, was able to kill cancer cells that were taken from CLL patients and put in a test tube with the tea compound. After the findings were published, the doctors became aware of four CLL patients at their center who had started using green tea products and seemed to be doing better. In interviewing the patients and reviewing their records, the doctors found that three showed signs of a regression in their cancer after they started to drink green tea or take green tea capsules. The fourth had an improvement in her white blood cell count, though her disease remained unchanged by standard criteria. --More 19 36 Local Time 16 36 GMT
