A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF ANTIHYPERTENSIVE EFFECTS OF MEDICINAL PLANTS IN ASTERACEAE FAMILY

Background Recently, arterial hypertension (AHT) or high blood pressure is considered as one of the most frequent illness conditions around the world especially in developing countries. Asteraceae is a well-known family of flowering plants. So far, the pharmacological and therapeutic properties of a large number of plants in this family have proven; therefore, in the present study we decided to review some plants of this family that are used to treat hypertension around the world. Methods In this review, we used a number of databases such as Web of Science, PubMed, Google scholar EMBASE, Scopus and directory of open access journals (DOAJ) to recognize all published articles on the subject. Our search was carried out without date limitation based on the combinations of some key words and or their equivalents; “hypertension”, “blood pressure”, “antihypertensive”, “ethnobotany”, “medicinal plants”, “traditional medicine”, “Asteraceae”, and also any individual herb name in this family cited in the hypertension literature. Results Of the 3445 papers obtained from all of the databases up to 2020, 41 articles were reliable and were scrutinized (Table. 1). The most parts of these plants are leave (95.1%) and root (31.7%), respectively; whereas these medicinal herbs are most commonly used in countries of Asian and African such as Iran, Pakistan, India, Mexico, and South Africa, etc. Table 1 shows the medicinal plants that traditionally used to treat hypertension around the world. Conclusion The obtained findings revealed that medicinal herbs in Asteraceae family are globally used to treat and reduce hypertension. These results suggested that the plants in this family may be considered as alternative agents in the treatment of hypertension; of course, after the evaluation of their toxicity in clinical models; however further investigations are required to clear the accurate anti-hypertensive mechanisms as well as toxicity of these plants in human subjects.