Abstract

Worldwide, cardiovascular diseases are becoming a major concern of morbidity and mortality. This holds true in spite of preventive, diagnostic and treatment measures being used in the modern era of allopathic medicines. Herbal medicines can be used to treat and manage cardiovascular diseases as per their ethnomedical usage. There is dire need to explore the plant biodiversity for its medicinal and pharmacological potentials. Purpose of this review is to summarize evidences regarding cardioprotective potential of different herbs claimed to be cardioprotective as per ethnomedical use. PubMed, ScienceDirect, Google, Google Scholar and Cochrane databases were searched from 1966 to 2023 for the english literature using the terms medicinal plants together with different terms such as cardioprotective, heart disease, hyperlipidaemia, hypertension, ischaemia, oxidative stress. Investigations involving about 76 articles including research articles, meta-analyses, observational studies, reviews were retrieved and analyzed in line with the stated purpose of this study. 44 articles concerning the heart protective effects of 13 ethnomedicinal plants were included in the review. Heart protective effects of medicinal plants are attributed to their antioxidant, vasorelaxant, anti-inflammatory, anti-proliferative properties. Herbs are also reported to inhibit endothelial cell dysfunction, platelet aggregation and lipid peroxidation. Prevention from doxorubicin as well as isoproterenol cardiotoxicity and myocardial ischaemia reperfusion injury has been shown. Published evidence suggests a positive correlation between the use of medicinal plants claimed to be cardioprotective and heart protection. The use of medicinal plants in cardiovascular biology thus needs to be outlined by researchers and the medical community. The novelty and exhaustiveness of the present manuscript is reflected by the detailed outline of the molecular basis of herbal cardio-protection, active involvement of several herbs in ameliorating the cardiovascular status and the clinical studies considering the use of phytotherapy, all on a single platform.