Roots of Steel

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Most of the Russian studies on eleuthero’s adaptogenic properties used a 33 percent ethanol root extract (currently unavailable in the United States). Initial studies generally showed that those who took the extract demonstrated improvements in stamina, performance, endurance, reflexive action, and concentration. News of these results prompted more studies, and by 1962 the Soviet health ministry had accepted the extract as an official medicine.

The most comprehensive English-language review on eleuthero was published in 1985 by Dr. Norman Farnsworth and his colleagues at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The review was based pri­marily on Russian clinical studies published from 1960 to 1980. Studies involving healthy individuals included more than 2,000 people who were often exposed to stressful conditions (high heat, noise, motion, workload increase, and exercise) and used the 33 percent root extract at doses ranging from 2 to 16 ml taken one to three times daily for up to sixty consecutive days. Participants ranged in age from nineteen to seventy-two.

Eleuthero improves performance under a wide range of stressful conditions, and the extract can inhibit disease.

Among other things, the studies measured the effect of the extract on hearing during times of increased noise, on mental alertness, on work output and quality under stress-inducing conditions, and during athletic performance. Results were generally positive, with no reports of side effects.

The largest study included 1,000 adult men and women in a Soviet city with an average daily temperature of about 23°F. Study participants were factory workers involved in metallurgical work or mining. They took 4 ml of the extract daily for thirty-day periods five times in one year. The results, published in 1977, stated that the participants reported improvement in their performance (details weren’t included in the report), with a 40 percent reduction in lost work days and a 50 percent reduction in general illness. The individuals involved in these studies were generally described as normal or healthy, but they had very stressful jobs, such as working in mountain and mine rescue units or as deep-sea divers, sailors in tropical seas, telegraph operators, airplane pilots, and proofreaders.

Also during the 1960s and 1970s, at least thirty-five clinical studies were conducted to determine whether the eleuthero extract could help patients suffering from neuroses, artheriosclerosis, diabetes, hypertension, hypotension, chronic bronchitis, cancer, acute head trauma, rheumatic heart disease, and other ailments. Participants in these studies took from 0.5 to 6 ml one to three times daily for periods of thirty-five days. Patients showed measurable improvement with few side effects.

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