title: Brazilian plants with possible action on the central nervous system: a study of historical sources from the 16th to 19th century.
abstract: Brazil is a country rich in biodiversity, endemism, and cultural diversity, inhabited by different types of population. European expeditions and the migratory processes that began in the 16th century greatly contributed both to cultural diversity and to Brazilian popular therapeutics, and produced the first records on medicinal plants in Brazil. This study comprises a bibliographical survey of historic books found in Sao Paulo libraries (16th through 19th centuries) on medicinal plants exerting effects on the central nervous system (CNS). Thirty-four plants native to Brazil were selected from the reading of the books. Of these 34 plants, 13 were also recorded in ethnopharmacological studies among modern Brazilian communities and 16 have been studied phytochemically. Only eight have been the object of pharmacological studies, six of these, recently, with a request for a patent. Results showed that most of the species recorded in this study have been reported as medicinal for centuries, but have never been the object of pharmacological investigation down to the present time. Such results provide ideas for a selection of these species as potentially bioactive to be included in future pharmacological studies.
authors.affiliation: CEBRID, Department of Psychobiology at UNIFESP, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
authors.forename: Melina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Giorgetti
authors.forename: Giuseppina
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Negri
authors.forename: Eliana
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Rodrigues
mesh_terms: D001877:Books; D001938:Brazil; D002491:Central Nervous System Agents / Q000266:history / Q000494:pharmacology*; D020834:Ethnopharmacology / Q000266:history; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D008519:Medicine, Traditional / Q000266:history*; D008517:Phytotherapy / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010946:Plants, Medicinal
chemical_list: D002491:Central Nervous System Agents