Pathways to healing: Plants with therapeutic potential for neurodegenerative diseases

Abstract

Some of the greatest challenges in medicine are the neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), which remain without a cure and mostly progress to death. A companion study employed a toolkit methodology to document 2001 plant species with ethnomedicinal uses for alleviating pathologies relevant to NDs, focusing on its relevance to Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study aimed to find plants with therapeutic bioactivities for a range of NDs. 1339 of the 2001 plant species were found to have a bioactivity from the literature of therapeutic relevance to NDs such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, AD, motor neurone diseases, multiple sclerosis, prion diseases, Neimann-Pick disease, glaucoma, Friedreich's ataxia and Batten disease. 43 types of bioactivities were found, such as reducing protein misfolding, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress and cell death, and promoting neurogenesis, mitochondrial biogenesis, autophagy, longevity, and anti-microbial activity. Ethno-led plant selection was more effective than random selection of plant species. Our findings indicate that ethnomedicinal plants provide a large resource of ND therapeutic potential. The extensive range of bioactivities validate the usefulness of the toolkit methodology in the mining of this data. We found that a number of the documented plants are able to modulate molecular mechanisms underlying various key ND pathologies, revealing a promising and even profound capacity to halt and reverse the processes of neurodegeneration.

Keywords: A-H, Alpers-Huttenlocher syndrome; AD, Alzheimer’s disease; ALS, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; BBB, blood-brain barrier; C. elegans,, Caenorhabditis elegans; CJD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; CMT, Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease; CS, Cockayne syndrome; Ech A, Echinochrome A; FDA, Food and Drug Administration; FRDA, Friedreich’s ataxia; FTD, Frontotemporal dementia; HD, Huntington’s disease; Hsp, Heat shock protein; LSD, Lysosomal storage diseases; MS, Multiple sclerosis; MSA, Multiple system atrophy; MSP, Multisystem proteinopathy; Medicinal plant; ND, neurodegenerative disease; NPC, Neimann-Pick disease type C; NSC, neural stem cells; Neuro-inflammation; Neurodegeneration; Neurogenesis; PC, pharmacological chaperone; PD, Parkinson’s disease; Protein misfolding; SMA, Spinal muscular atrophy; VD, Vascular dementia; prion dis, prion diseases; α-syn, alpha-synuclein.