The confrontation between ethnopharmacology and pharmacological tests of medicinal plants associated with mental and neurological disorders

Abstract

For neurological disorders, pharmacological tests have shown promising results in the reduction of side efects when using plants with known therapeutic efects in the treatment of some types of dementia. Terefore, the goals of this study are to gather data about the major medicinal plants used in the nervous system as described in ethnopharmacological surveys from South America and Brazil and to compare this data with the results from pharmacological tests on the active principles of those same plants found in the scientifc literature. Afer collecting the data about each plant, their respective popular indication was compared with the results found through pharmacological tests. Te discrepancy rate between the efects observed by ethnopharmacological and pharmacological methods in this study is greater than 50%. In conclusion, despite the importance of ethnopharmacological data, it is important to make comparisons with pharmacological tests for the same plants, since the pharmacological studies, although few, have shown a high rate of discrepancy in the results.