When undergoing chemotherapy, cancer patients often experience side effects such as loss of appetite, nausea or difficulty chewing and swallowing. Ginger can reduce these side effects.

The doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, is now looking for herbal way to help cancer patients cope with side effects of chemotherapy.

Oncologist at the hospital have been experimenting with powdered ginger to reduce the severity of muah, easily caused due to chemotherapy (chemotherapy induced nausea or vomiting CINV).

Nausea and vomiting are the most important side effects in cancer patients after undergoing chemotherapy treatment.

“The severity of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting can be reduced with ginger, our experiments show that,” Dr. Sameer Bakhshi, of the Department of Medical Oncology, AIIMS, New Delhi, as reported by Indiavision.

After the success of the study, doctors at AIIMS can say that there is a need for menyedian ginger root powder in capsules in varying doses to be used as an adjunctive therapy in patients receiving chemotherapy with a high potential for vomiting.

In that study, researchers had randomly assigned 60 patients aged between 18 to 21 years.

“This is a randomized double-blind study of single institutional conducted at our center in 2009. Neither the patient nor the patient knows about the patient interviewers who administered a dose of ginger root powder,” said Dr. Bakhshi, who led the study.

He said that the doses administered in accordance with the weight of the person. While patients who weigh between 20 kg to 40 kg given 167 mg capsules of ginger root powder, whereas patients in the 40 kg weight category up to 60kg are given 400 mg.

Six capsules of ginger root is given at different time intervals after starting intravenous chemotherapy.

“Although powdered ginger root is effective in reducing the severity of acute nausea and vomiting, it does not eliminate the symptoms completely. The capsules were well tolerated by children and young adults in our study and no side effects,” he said.

The results of this study have been published in the Journal of Pediatric Blood and Cancer.