Centella asiatica Gotu Kola

This descriptive section documents the botany, chemistry and long history of gotu kola. It makes no promise of efficacy: therapeutic uses belong to ongoing research and to medical advice, never to a product page.

Botany

Centella asiatica (synonym Hydrocotyle asiatica), also called asiatic pennywort, is a creeping perennial herb of the Apiaceae — the family of carrot, parsley, fennel and celery. She spreads by stolons, forming dense green mats in moist soils: roadsides, rice paddies, shaded gardens. Her rounded leaves, shaped like a kidney or a frog's foot (hence Mandukaparni), and her tiny flowers make her an unassuming plant, almost invasive in favourable soil. Native to tropical and subtropical Asia, she has naturalised across most of the world's warm wetlands — Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, China, Indonesia, Madagascar, tropical Africa, as far as the Americas. It is the aerial parts (the leaves) that are harvested.

Phytochemistry (descriptive)

Gotu kola's signature compounds are the triterpene saponins: asiaticoside (roughly 0.5 to 3.7% of dry weight according to pharmacological reviews), madecassoside (0.29 to 6.09%), asiatic acid (0.04 to 0.58%) and madecassic acid. The plant also contains flavonoids (quercetin, kaempferol, rutin), polyphenols, phytosterols (beta-sitosterol), amino acids and vitamins (B, C, K). These ranges are descriptive analytical data, varying with chemotype, season and terroir — they say nothing about an effect in the person who consumes the plant.

What the studies report

Modern research has taken a strong interest in Centella asiatica, to the point that one review speaks of a "remarkably broad" spectrum of activity. Studies in vitro and in animal models report that asiaticoside stimulates fibroblast proliferation and collagen synthesis (the finding that fuelled interest in wound healing and the Cica cosmetics wave), that asiatic acid is being studied as a neuroprotective agent in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's models, and that standardised triterpene extracts have been used clinically in chronic venous insufficiency. Several clinical trials have explored measures of cognition, attention and anxiety. This work describes research leads, often on titrated extracts rather than on the whole leaf in infusion; it is not proof of efficacy for a food use, and nothing here should be read as a promise of care.

Lineage and long history

Gotu kola is a case of ethnobotanical convergence: five civilisations with no direct contact — Ayurvedic India, Sri Lanka, the traditional medicine of China, the jamu of Indonesia, village Madagascar — identified her independently as a plant of cognition, longevity and skin care. Mentioned in the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, linked by Vedic tradition to the Sapta Rishis and to the sahasrara, woven into Sri Lankan daily life in kola kenda, she also fed the modern imagination of longevity through the figure of Li Ching-Yuen (the herbalist said to have lived 256 years, an age the chroniclers themselves hold to be a hoax). In the early 21st century, the Korean cosmetics industry brought her back to the centre of world attention under the name Cica, making a millennia-old medicinal plant visible to millions.

Safety notes

At usual doses, gotu kola is very well tolerated and is part of the daily diet in Southeast Asia. The documented points of caution: possible contact dermatitis from the fresh leaf in sensitive people; at high dose, headaches, palpitations, itching, even temporary loss of consciousness (Rätsch); possible amplification of barbiturates, sedatives and analgesics; caution in case of pre-existing liver disease; reserve during pregnancy and breastfeeding; care in people allergic to Apiaceae. To be taken in courses, with breaks, and never as a replacement for medical advice.