Ethnopharmacological relevance: Diarrhoea is a serious problem affecting 35 billion people per year around the world especially children of beow 5 yr. 70% of world population uses traditional and indigenous medicine for their primary health care. The facts of these indigenous remedies are passed verbally and some times as documents. Since ancient time, Ayurveda is the main system of healing in South East Asian countries. Indian literature from ayurvedic texts and other books claim the potency of several plants in the treatment of diarrhoea. As the global prospective of Ayurvedic medicine is increasing, interest regarding the scientific basis of their action is parallely increasing. Researchers are doing experiments to establish the relation between the claimed action and observed pharmacological activities. In the present article an attempt was made to compile the scientific basis of medicinal plants used to cure diarrhoea in Ayurveda.
Methods: Literature was collected via electronic search (PubMed, Sciencedirect, Medline and Google Scholar) from published articles that reports antidiarrhoeal activity of plants that were mentioned in Ayurveda classics.
Results: A total of 110 plant species belonging to 59 families were reported for their antidiarrhoeal activity.
Conclusion: Several Indian medicinal plants have demonstrated promising antidiarrhoeal effects but the studies on the antidiarrhoeal potentials of these plants are not taken beyond proof of concept stage. It is hoped that the article would stimulate future clinical studies because of the paucity of knowledge in this area.
Key words: Diarrhoea, Ayurveda, traditional medicine, medicnal plant.
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