Gao et al. 2025 - Arsenic in wild Cordyceps sinensis
Gao et al. compared wild Cordyceps sinensis powder with an equivalent total arsenic dose delivered as inorganic arsenic compounds in mice. The paper is useful for herbal/botanical supplement context because it reports the arsenic content and inorganic arsenic ratio of the Cordyceps material used for dosing. At the maximum clinical dose tested, Cordyceps did not produce the organ accumulation and hepatorenal toxicity seen with equivalent-dose inorganic arsenic.
Key numbers
| Finding | Source-reported value |
|---|---|
| Wild Cordyceps dose | 1.85 g/kg/day in mice |
| Total arsenic in tested Cordyceps | 16.36 mg/kg |
| Arsenic species ratio | Arsenite:arsenate = 1:2 in the tested Cordyceps material |
| Equivalent inorganic arsenic dose | 0.03 mg/kg/day in mice |
| Human-dose basis used by authors | 9 g/60 kg maximum clinical dose converted by body-surface-area method |
| Literature context cited by authors | Wild Cordyceps total arsenic ranges of 2.10 to 9.97 mg/kg, 4.4 to 9.9 mg/kg, and 5.77 to 13.20 mg/kg in prior studies |
| Toxicity comparison | Cordyceps group showed no significant adverse effects on body weight, organ indices, organ arsenic accumulation, liver/kidney function, or histopathology; inorganic arsenic group showed significant liver and kidney accumulation and injury markers |
Methods (brief)
The authors washed, dried, powdered, and sieved wild Cordyceps sinensis harvested from Zaduo County, Qinghai Province. Arsenic content and speciation had been measured by HPLC-AFS in prior method validation. CD-1 mice were gavaged for the animal comparison, and organ arsenic was measured by ICP-MS after microwave digestion.
This source reports arsenic in a medicinal fungus/supplement matrix and then evaluates in vivo organ accumulation. It does not make the Cordyceps product equivalent to a finished US dietary supplement lot.
Implications
For herbal-botanical and supplement pages, this source adds a high total-arsenic Cordyceps datapoint with explicit inorganic arsenic species ratio. It also cautions that equivalent total arsenic can behave differently depending on matrix and species.
For standards work, the product occurrence value is the 16.36 mg/kg total arsenic in the tested wild Cordyceps material. The animal organ data should be routed as toxicology/context rather than as product concentration data.
Wiki pages this source may touch
- herbal-botanicals
- dietary-supplements
- pet-supplements-botanical-herbal
- arsenic-total
- arsenic-inorganic
- arsenic
Verification notes
The wishlist route named toys/balloons, but the actual PDF is a Cordyceps pharmacology paper. The DOI and title in the PDF support ingest under Cordyceps/herbal supplement context, with the mismatch noted here rather than escalated.
Page history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.
| Commit | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| c1aef38 | 2026-06-02 | audit-queue: hamid2021-bacterial-plant-biostimulants-review → audited-promote |