Potential Medicinal Plants for CNS Disorders

REVIEW ARTICLE
Potential Medicinal Plants for CNS Disorders:an Overview
Phytother Res. 2006 Dec;20(12):1023-35.
Kumar V.

This is a review article summarizing some important medicinal plants widely used to treat cognitive problems. They discuss Ginkgo biloba, St johns wort, Kava kava, valerian, Bacopa monniera and Convolvulus pluricaulis.

In Summary they say:
Although clinical trials have repeatedly shown the effectiveness of these herbal remedies, there is little effort put into extracting and developing drugs from these natural products for treating CNS disorders.

There are extensive programs aimed at developing anti-cancer drugs from natural sources but there is little effort aimed at identifying novel CNS-active drugs from natural sources.

There are several research papers evaluating traditional herbal remedies, and these generate more evidence justifying their therapeutic use.

Ginkgo biloba has structurally unique terpenic lactones- bilobalide and ginkgolides.
Ginkgo extract has been shown to have neuroprotective, metabolic and rheological effects and is taken to treat Alzheimers disease and vascular dementia.
Although there is structural similarity between ginkgolides and bilobalide there are few analogies between their CNS activity profile. The differences are probably due to the accessibility of their pharmacophore- t-butyl substituted cyco-pentane ring.

The synthetic cholinesterase inhibitors are tacrine, donepezil, rivastigmine, glantamine.
The adverse drug reactions were more than ten times more common than the Ginkgo extract (EGb)