Who You Gonna Call? Cold-Busters!

Derailing the common cold
Monday, January 7, 2008
BY EVELYN SHIH

Dr. Peter Gross of Park Ridge was feeling low on energy and achy all over. He’d heard it from patients oh-so-many times, and he knew what was probably coming.

But he refused to give in. He decided to try something he’d heard of recently, a supplement called Cold-fx.

Like the wildly popular Airborne, an herbal “effervescent health formula” that claims to bust colds with a liquid immune boost, Cold-fx promises a shorter cold with alleviated symptoms. Although you can take Cold-fx pills regularly for immune system health, a burst of pills during a three-day period can beat back a cold before it starts.

So says hockey legend Mark Messier, the official endorser of the formula. Half-believing the athlete in the ads and half-desperate for something that might work, Gross decided to give it a shot.

A day later, he was feeling great. “Certainly, it seemed impressive,” he said. “But I don’t know if it went away because I took the medicine, or because it was a 24-hour cold.”

As the senior vice president and chief medical officer of Hackensack University Medical Center, Gross has to remain skeptical. Every year during the cold and flu season, everyone gets sick. And every year, there are over-the-counter supplements and herbal medicines that claim to be the magic potion. The trouble is, there is little proof that any of them actually work.

Take Airborne, the over-thecounter success story of 2005. Developed by Victoria Knight-Mc- Dowell, a second-grade schoolteacher from California, the Alka- Seltzer style dissolving tablets had a great back story.

Then came the testimonials from Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern combined with an aggressive marketing strategy. Even though it doesn’t need to prove its effectiveness because it is a supplement, Airborne began giving traditional cold medicines like Sudafed and Benadryl heat last year. In fiscal year 2006, it raked in $138 million in a $4.6 billion overthe- counter cold-allergy industry — a huge growth from its $2 million sales figure a mere four years ago.

But even the company’s CEO, Elise Donahue, would not claim there was proof in the pudding. “I would never sit here and tell you that it’s a cure for the common cold,” she said in an interview with ABC News last February.

There hasn’t been a reliable scientific article published on the effects of Airborne, although millions of consumers are buying it every winter. The formula does, however, contain ingredients such as zinc, echinacea, garlic, ginger and vitamin C — all of which were magic cures in their own day.

All of these supersupplements, including the old stalwart vitamin C, remain controversial to this day. Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling was the first advocate of taking megadoses as a way to beat the sniffles. He published a book that made vitamin C the Airborne of 1970, “Vitamin C and the Common Cold.”

According to Gross, studies in the intervening 37 years haven’t shown the effects to be “impressive.”

Yet according to Dr. Raymond Villongco, an internist with a practice in Teaneck, reliable studies have indicated a positive effect. “People taking 200 milligrams regularly may have less symptoms when they catch a cold,” he said. “And the duration of a cold attack would be much less than for people not taking it.”

Echinacea, too, has had a history filled with skeptics and advocates. The first people to use it as a medicinal herb were Native Americans in the Great Plains. The herb had a period of popularity in European and American circles in the 1930s. Most recently, it has been a health-food store staple for at least 10 years — but randomized, placebo-controlled studies in 2002 and 2003 didn’t show it to have much of an effect on colds.

It’s difficult to prove that supplements can change the course of a cold because of the possible placebo effect, said Gross. In medical studies, a placebo can account for up to 30 percent of positive results reported.

But HUMC is working on a study that could put questions to rest — at least, for one product. The hospital has been commissioned to do a randomized, placebo-controlled study on the effects of Cold-fx on specific immune responses.

“I’d really like to have it proven that it works, so that it could be prescribed for everybody,” said Gross.

Would he take it again himself?

“Yes.”

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com