Saw Palmetto - Scientific Background
Saw palmetto berry extract is the most widely used plant medicine for BPH. Common preparations have names such as permixon, PA109, curbicin, prostagalen, prostaselect, prostavigo, and strogen forte.
Saw palmetto inhibits the influence of a male hormone on prostate tissue.
The main effect of saw palmetto, as an extract of the fat-soluble berry substances, is to reduce some of the effects of the hormones responsible for male characteristics (i.e., androgenic hormones). It is these hormones that cause BPH (Ravenna et al 1996; Weisser et al 1996).
Saw palmetto extract can reduce the conversion of the male hormone testosterone to the more active dihydrotestosterone (DHT). The more potent DHT appears to increase the growth rate of benign prostate cells, although the reason for this effect is unclear (Di Silverio et al 1992).
Saw palmetto works better than placebo.
In controlled clinical trials of men with BPH, the saw palmetto extract was more effective in reducing urinary symptoms than placebo and similar in effectiveness to standard pharmaceutical drug treatment (Plosker and Brogden 1996; Gerber et al 1998; Wilt et al 1998).
Saw palmetto works as well as standard treatment.
In a large randomized trial, improvement of urinary BPH symptoms was similar for saw palmetto and for finasteride, a common prescription drug for treating BPH. Finasteride reduced prostate volume and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels, which are a measure of prostate cell growth, while saw palmetto did not. Finasteride treatment resulted in more complaints of loss of libido; of men taking finasteride, 4.9% reported erectile problems in contrast to 1.1% of men taking saw palmetto (Carraro et al 1996).
