This Research Topic is part of a series. See also Volume I:
Herbal Medicine - action mechanism and clinical application.
This collection will provide an action mechanism and clinical application of herbal medicines in view of the recent development in herbal medicine research. The particular focus is on the clinical usage on the various diseases and conditions based on the scientific data.
Throughout the history of herbal medicines including traditional Chinese medicine and Japanese Kampo medicine, the basic theories and the methods of diagnosis and treatment have differed considerably from those of biomedicine. Biomedicine uses disease-based diagnosis, while systems based on traditional herbal medicines emphasize patient-based diagnosis.
These traditional medicines form a complex body of knowledge, commonly employed in medical practice for example in Kampo medicine, where over 200 recipes composed of mixtures of 2 to 15 components have been reported. Approximately 350 different components are used for these recipes. Most of them are medicinal plants, but fungi, animal components, and minerals are also used. Approximately 120 of these crude drugs are listed in the Japanese Pharmacopeia, and one-third of them are also listed in WHO monographs.
Older individuals show a spectrum of features categorized as frailty, defined by unintentional weight loss, self-reported exhaustion, muscle weakness, slow walking speed, and low physical activity. The functional and behavioral aspects of frailty are associated with loss of lean mass in the form of sarcopenia and disturbed mind-body interactions. While middle-age is often associated with increased body weight in many developed countries, later life is characterized by frailty. Frailty is thus an important problem in aging societies which shorten the healthy life-span (health life years –HLY), a core epidemiological indicator relevant for assessing health needs globally.
Various chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, respiratory and neurological diseases underlie and worsen the frailty. Herbal medicines have been historically reported to have significant beneficial effects on various bodily functions including frailty-related conditions. The multi-component herbal medicines capable of targeting multiple sites could be useful for managing complex conditions and reducing polypharmacy in aged patients. Mechanistic studies and identification of active compounds could lead to new discoveries in research on aging and facilitate the clinical applications of herbal medicines.
However, an important problem is the paucity for evidence from modern clinical research on such complex medicines, as well as the lack of quality control of medicinal plants used. In Japan, Kampo medicine is covered within the national medical insurance system and the variation of medicinal plants in the content of active components are regulated to be around 30 %. This is unfortunately not true for many other medical systems using herbal medicines. However, without the data on quality control, the reproducibility of results as well as the clinical application to the patients are not warranted.
In the volume 2, we focus more on frailty and related diseases from modern medicinal point of view. Translational cellular, molecular and animal studies are also welcome although the submission without the quality data on medicinal plants and their composition will not be considered in this special issue.
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All the manuscripts submitted to the collection will need to fully comply with the
Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version
here).
