Ginseng Compounds: An Update on Their Molecular Mechanisms and Medical Applications
By Jianming Lü, Qi Yao, Changyi J. Chen. Current Vascular Pharmacology, 2009
604 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ginseng is one of the most widely used herbal medicines and is reported to have a wide range of therapeutic and pharmacological applications. Ginsenosides, the major pharmacologically active ingredients of ginseng, appear to be responsible for most of the activities of ginseng including vasorelaxation, antioxidation, anti-inflammation and anti-cancer. Approximately 40 ginsenoside compounds have been identified. Researchers are now focused on using purified individual ginsenoside to reveal the specific mechanism of functions of ginseng instead of using whole ginseng root extracts. Each ginsenoside may have different effects in pharmacology and mechanisms due to their different chemical structures. Among them the most commonly studied ginsenosides are Rb1, Rg1, Rg3, Re, Rd and Rh1. The molecular mechanisms and medical applications of ginsenosides have attracted much attention and hundreds of papers have been published in the last few years. The general purpose of this update is to provide current information on recently described effects of ginsenosides on antioxidation, vascular system, signal transduction pathways and interaction with receptors. Their therapeutic applications in animal models and humans as well as the pharmacokinetics and toxicity of ginsenosides are also discussed in this review. This review concludes with some thoughts for future directions in the further development of ginseng compounds as effective therapeutic agents.
Subfields: Molecular Biology, Pharmacology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b72076807da33e8db83a6d738055c88993afb0f
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Citations in the corpus
- Herbal extracts and phytochemicals: plant secondary metabolites and the enhancement of human brain function. (2011, background): “Animal behavioral models suggest that ginsenosides have antistress, antidepressant, and anxiolytic effects; moderate fatigue; improve memory in impaired rodents, and improve learning by fostering neurogenesis and modulating long-term potentiation in the hippocampus (156,159,160).”
- Chemical and molecular mechanisms of antioxidants: experimental approaches and model systems (2009, background): “For example, ginseng contains steroid-like compounds, ginsenosides, which show antioxidant activities against free radical damage on the vascular endothelium [11].”