Abstract

TRADITIONAL ANTIHYPERTENSIVE MEDICINAL PLANTS: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW

Prema Modak*, Satyajit Halder, Bidduth Kumar Sarkar, Ananya Das, Arghya Prosun Sarkar and Sukalyan Kumar Kundu

ABSTRACT

Hypertension is a multifactorial disease suffered by many people today. Current conventional treatments have done little to reduce the number of patients with hypertension because they are highly expensive and are usually associated with many side effects. Moreover, these drugs increase the risk of developing new disease, making the situation more complicated. Now a days, most of the world population, mainly in developing countries use herbal medicines because of their better acceptability with human body and lesser side effects. In this review hundreds of commonly used herbal plants have been analyzed for their antihypertensive potential on the basis of previously published literatures. The hypotensive and antihypertensive effects of some of these traditional medicinal plants have been validated and others disproved. However, ayurvedic knowledge needs to be coupled with modern medicine and more scientific research to verify the effectiveness and safety profile of such herbal remedies and finally to discover unexplored herbs so that they can be used as an alternate of synthetic expensive drugs.

Keywords: Hypertension, Herbs, Medicinal Plants, Antihypertensive Activity.