Rochester: Green tea has been found to help leukaemia patients, a new study has discovered.

In a limited experiment, three out of four adult patients, suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukamia or CLL, which usually occurs in middle-age, shows improvement after several months of drinking green tea.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, said the patients drank the tea on their own initiative after reading media reports on the properties of green tea.
The Mayo hadearler carried out tests in which cancer cells put into a test tube with a compound found in green tea, EGCG, were killed.

The three patients showed a regression in their cancer after consuming green tea or green tea capsules. The fourth patient showed an improvement in her white cell count but her condition remained unchanged. In another patient lymph nodes which swell in cancer patients started reducing in size.

The Mayo Clinic is now carrying out clinical trials to see how purified EGCG can treat CLL.