NANJING, Dec. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- A People's Liberation Army (PLA) hospital has used traditional herb alongside Western medicine to treat kidney transplant patients of acute reactions and infections after the operation.

    Kidney transplants are taken as an effective cure for uremia and chronic renal failure, but quite a number of patients fail the surgery because of acute rejections to donor kidneys and many other complications.

    The General Hospital of the Nanjing Military Area Command, based in east China's Jiangsu Province, has reduced patients' risks for complications with herbal medicine, particularly the rhubarb -- a herb that is often used as a laxative.

    "We've used the combined therapy on 1,000 kidney transplant patients so far, the absolute majority of them have good prognosis," said Prof. Li Leishi, head of the hospital's kidney disease institute and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

    According to Li, the success rate of a hospital's kidney transplants is evaluated with the survival rate of the patients as well as that of the donor organs in a given period of time. "The Nanjing hospital reported 60.9 percent survival rate of its patients and 37 percent of the donor kidneys in the 10 years between 1993 and 2003," he said.

    Li said percentages are higher than the United States figures by three percent and 0.6 percent respectively.

    "Besides, the hospital has reported 100 percent survival rates for all the 113 donor kidneys it transplanted this year," he added.

    He said the success is the result of herbal medicine as well asthe state-of-the-art know-how the hospital has introduced from abroad. "We keep the patients' medical files in an electronic database and arrange regular checkups for all the kidney transplant patients to make sure they're doing well after the operation."

    Prof. Li has been using herbal medicine in treating chronic kidney diseases since the 1980s. In 1990, he started to use herb for researches on molecular immunology and cell biology. He found the plants were cheaper and had less side-effects as compared with drugs commonly used to treat rejections.              Enditem