Medicinal plants as potential sources of drugs for cardiovascular diseases traditional and mineral approaches

ABSTRACT

Nature has provided man with herbal medicine suiting different conditions and climate. These herbs or medicinal plants have been used in traditional system - or folklore system of medicine for centuries. Traditional system of medicine have provided lead over many of the important drugs used in the modern medicine. Perhaps all basic principles pertaining to human therapy have been derived from plants. Phyto-chemical investigations of these medicinal plants show the presence of flavonoids, glycosides, essential oils, bioactive terpenoids and minerals. For the last few decades great deal of work has been done on pharmacological activity of the organic constituents of these plants but role of minerals in health and disease has attracted attention only recently. Scientific research has established the fact that the relative concentration of several trace elements in the body are altered in all diseases. Possible role of few trace elements are discussed in Table 1. In the present work, three medicinal plants used in cardiovascular diseases in the Unani system of medicine were analyzed for their elemental composition and effectiveness of these drugs have been discussed from traditional, phytochemical and elementological point of view