British scientists are turning to traditional Chinese medicine and using extracts from sage and other plants to develop new treatments for Alzheimer's disease and pelvic pain, they said on Monday.

Researchers from Oxford Natural Products Plc, a British plant-based pharmaceutical company, and doctors from Oxford University told a science conference they hoped to begin a clinical trial early next year of a new treatment for pelvic pain and menstruation based on three Chinese plants.

"It is the first randomised controlled trial in the West of a traditional Chinese medicine product to treat painful periods," Dr Stephen Kennedy, a gynaecologist at Oxford University, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

Eighty women will be recruited for the study which will test the remedy, the first produced by Oxford Natural Products.

If it is successful the company said it would investigate developing the treatment as a new remedy to relieve menstrual pain.

"It is a mixture of three indigenous Chinese plants, all of which have historical use in treating women's complaints," said Dr Peter Hylands, of Oxford Natural Products.

PLANTS GROWN IN CHINA

He refused to reveal what the plants were, but said they were being grown at a company site in Beijing enabling the firm to guarantee the quality and origin of the plants and their extracts. The company has also developed new technology to analyse the extracts.

"The main goal...is to develop our own products using this technology and since the leads come from traditional medicine we can use the data, explaining that the materials had been exposed to patients over many hundreds of years, to guarantee and allow us early clinical evaluation," Hylands added.

Kennedy said two-thirds of women suffer from menstrual pain and three-quarters of them find the symptoms disabling.

He thinks the herbal treatment will act as a muscle relaxant but without many of the side effects of currently available drugs for pelvic and menstrual pain.

Professor John Wilkinson of Middlesex University is taking a similar approach to developing a potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease from sage extract.

Wilkinson and his colleagues are using traditional herbs, robotic systems and computer technology to test the effects of thousands of different plant extracts.

They have tested purified compounds from sage extract to see if they inhibit an enzyme called acetyl cholinesterase. The amount of the enzyme in the brain is thought to be linked to memory loss in Alzheimer's disease.

"What we are doing is trying to develop a herbal extract which could be used as an acetyl cholinesterase inhibitor for Alzheimer's disease and other areas of the brain," he said.