Abstract
Cardiovascular disease is a kind of heart, brain, and blood vessel injury disease by the interaction of various pathological factors. The pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease is complex with various risk factors, including abnormally elevated blood pressure, glucose, and lipid metabolism disorders, atherosclerosis, thrombosis, etc. Plant polysaccharides are a special class of natural products derived from plant resources, which have the characteristics of wide sources, diverse biological activities, and low toxicity or side effects. Many studies have shown that plant polysaccharides improve cardiovascular diseases through various mechanisms such as anti-oxidative stress, restoring the metabolism of biological macromolecules, regulating the apoptosis cascade to reduce cell apoptosis, and inhibiting inflammatory signal pathways to alleviate inflammation. This article reviews the pharmacological effects and protective mechanisms of some plant polysaccharides in modulating the cardiovascular system, which is beneficial for developing more effective drugs with low side effects for management of cardiovascular diseases.
Highlights
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a type of chronic non-infectious disease caused by circulatory system damage (Abe et al, 2017), with the characteristics of high incidence and large mortality
Hypertension characterized by an uncontrolled increase in blood pressure leads to arteriosclerosis and myocardial injury, which has been regarded as one of the major factors to induce a series of refractory CVDs including coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease and heart failure (Huang et al, 2013)
As one of the main active ingredients in most plant extracts, polysaccharides are widely used in research on the treatment of cardiovascular diseases
Summary
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a type of chronic non-infectious disease caused by circulatory system damage (Abe et al, 2017), with the characteristics of high incidence and large mortality. A large number of studies have shown that plant polysaccharides have various bioactivities such as anti-tumor, immunomodulation, antioxidant, radioprotection, hepatoprotection, anti-virus (Xie et al, 2016; Yu et al, 2018), which play an important role in regulating human physiological functions. Cardioprotective Actions of Herbal Glycans shown other functions of plant polysaccharides such as antioxidant, anti-hyperglycemic, anti-hypertensive, antiatherosclerosis, anti-myocardial ischemia etc. These pharmacological effects provide a theoretical basis for plant polysaccharides to treat CVD. This article reviews reported mechanisms by which plant polysaccharides protect CVD from the perspective of multiple pharmacological effects
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