Therapeutic application of wet-ground bee pollen in benign prostatic hyperplasia

Bee pollen is produced by honeybees and is considered one of the most balanced and nourishing nutritional supplements available. Historically, bee pollen has been prescribed for its healing properties and consumed for its high energy supply. Recently, accumulating evidence suggest that bee pollen has diverse biological activities, such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and even anticancer effects. However, the outer membrane of the pollen grain, exine, is highly resistant to most acidic solutions, high pressure, and even digestive enzymes, and the resulting low bioavailability limits its nutritional and clinical applications. To overcome this limitation, we employed a wet grinding method to effectively destroy the exine then, examined the pollen's biological activity in benign prostatic hyperplasia. First, microscopic observations provided strong evidence that wet grinding destroyed the exine time-dependently. In addition, the content of polyphenols, well-known ingredients of bee pollen and used as internal standards for the quality control of commercial pollen preparations, increased up to 11-fold with wet grinding. Further, the antioxidant activity demonstrated on the ABTS antioxidant assay as well as the DPPH radical scavenging assay was also dramatically increased. The potential biological effect of wet-ground bee pollen was examined in animal model of benign prostatic hyperplasia. For this purpose we compared the effect of wet-ground bee pollen with dutasteride, a 5α reductase inhibitor. In this study, we found that the reduced size of prostate in wet-ground bee pollen-treated animals was comparable to that in dutasteride-administered animals. Finally, we found that bee pollen has immune-modulating effect in animal model by influencing differentiation of T cells as well as B cells. Taken together, the results presented here support a new therapeutic potential of wet-ground bee pollen in benign prostatic hyperplasia.