Green Tea May Aid Liver Disease Patients

By Liza Jane Maltin

April 23, 2002

It's already been connected to inhibiting factors that increase the risk of heart disease and cancer, and now there's evidence that the miracle brew -- green tea -- may help prevent transplant failure in people with liver failure.

Right now, there are far more people in need of a liver transplant than there are suitable donor livers. The problem is that donor organs usually become available due to accidents, and quite often, accidents involve alcohol. Livers subjected to excess alcohol are not good candidates for transplantation. They are too fatty -- full of dangerous free radicals that make them susceptible to transplant failure, which can kill the recipient.

Free radicals are naturally produced in the body, and antioxidants help get rid of them.

Zhi Zhong, PhD, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues looked at whether the powerful, free-radical scavenging antioxidants in green tea could alleviate some of the problems associated with fatty livers.

First, the researchers reproduced alcohol abuse in rats. After a bout of "binge drinking," the drunken rats were put to sleep and their livers removed. These fatty livers spent 24 hours in cold storage, and then some of them were bathed in a solution containing green tea extract. The team then transplanted a group of rats with these seemingly unfit organs and others with normal, healthy livers.

Only 13% of the rats that received untreated fatty livers survived, compared with 88% of those that received healthy livers. In contrast, survival rate was bumped up to 77% for rats that received a fatty liver bathed in green tea extract.

Green tea extract scavenges harmful free radicals in fatty livers and therefore could be an effective treatment to prevent failure of liver transplants, according to the researchers.