Abstract

AbstractStroke is known to be a major cause of mortality across the world. One of its type, cerebral ischemia (CI), caused due to reduction of blood flow to the brain, is being studied extensively nowadays in the field of herbal drug discovery in order to minimize the side effects of conventional medication and thereby eliminate the limitations of pharmacological treatment. This review on anti-cerebral ischemia therapeutics from nature uses electronic search engines such as Pubmed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Springer, Jstor etc. with appropriate search strings. The World Health Organization (WHO) places the global occurrence of cerebral ischemia at around 200 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, although the data varies among countries. Prevalent treatment includes drugs of thrombolytic, neuroprotective, anti-coagulatory, anti-platelet and vasodilatory nature. Side effects of these drugs have led to the discovery of herbal treatment which includes anti ischemic plant derived phytochemicals, plant crude extracts and herbal formulations. In this present review, a number of plant extracts, isolated compounds and herbal preparations with their respective ethnopharmacological backgrounds have been reported against several in vivo CI models modulating an array of biochemical and molecular markers associated with stroke. Significant efforts are needed to ensure that the new herbal treatments being discovered can be administered safely to humans. Human clinical trials should be done to provide greater ability to generalize in vivo results in the therapy of acute cerebral ischemia.