Excerpt By Anne Harding, Reuter's Health

BOSTON (Reuters Health) - A powder extracted from beeswax could one day offer a cheap, non-toxic way to reduce cholesterol, reported researchers from a Colorado company at the recent American Chemical Society meeting here.

But one expert argues that findings on the effectiveness of the extract must be independently confirmed, and that his own research has found no cholesterol-lowering benefit for similar substances.

The beeswax powder contains a mix of long alcohol molecules known as policosanol, which is found in virtually all waxy plant materials. Rod Lenoble, technical director of natural products company Hauser Inc. in Longmont, Colorado, described his company's development of the beeswax extract, along with promising data from a similar product made in Cuba from sugar cane wax. Due to trade restrictions, the Cuban extract cannot be sold in the US.

To date, Cuban scientists have conducted 15 trials of the sugar cane wax product with more than 1,000 patients, and have also compared the product to statins, the powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to millions of people with heart disease.

People given 5 to 20 milligrams (mg) of the extract daily saw their total cholesterol drop 17% to 19%, with LDL ("bad") cholesterol dropping by roughly 25%, Lenoble reported. While most of the studies found no effect on HDL ("good") cholesterol, the two largest studies, both lasting a year, found the extract increased good cholesterol by nearly 30%, he said.

And when Cuban researchers compared the product to five commercially available statins, they found the sugar cane wax extract compared favorably when it came to lowering both total and LDL cholesterol, Lenoble said.

To date, trials of the Cuban product have found no toxic effects, he added.

Lenoble and his colleagues have developed a policosanol extract from beeswax with a chemical profile similar to that of the Cuban extract, he said. The beeswax extract would be sold as a dietary supplement, he told Reuters Health, and would cost from to a month.

While research on policosanol is "very impressive and seems convincing," said Dr. Heiner K. Berthold, a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Bonn in Germany, it has been performed in only a few centers, and must be confirmed independently.

Berthold, who wrote a review of the evidence on policosanol and cholesterol published earlier this year, is also the executive secretary of the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association.

Berthold conducted a study, not yet published, that found policosanol did not lower blood lipids. "It will take us a while to discuss the possible explanations," he told Reuters Health in an interview, but noted he has more faith in his own data than that of other researchers.

While Berthold said he still believes policosanol might help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease through other effects, more independent studies of such effects are also needed, he added. If mild cholesterol-lowering effects of policosanol could be confirmed, he said, the extracts could indeed be helpful for patients with mild high cholesterol. "A lot of research is still required to get a clearer picture," he added.

Meanwhile, Lenoble and his colleagues are planning a 50-patient trial of the beeswax product. Patients will take 10 mg of the extract or an inactive placebo daily for 8 weeks. Data should be available within 6 months, Lenoble said.