Important Medicinal Plant Families in Thailand.

Methee Phumthum,Anders S Barfod,Henrik Balslev

doi:10.3389/fphar.2019.01125

Abstract

Throughout the world, surveys have been conducted at the country level to answer research questions pertaining to ethnomedicinal usage patterns. This study is focused on Thailand, which has never been surveyed systematically in this way. We mined 16,000 records of medicinal plant use from 64 scientific reports, which were published from 1990 to 2014. In total, 2,187 plant species were cited as being useful for medicinal purposes. The overall aim was to reveal the relative importance of the plant families for pharmacological research. To determine the most important medicinal plant families, we use a combination of three statistical approaches: linear regression, Binomial analysis, and Bayesian analysis. At the regional level, 19 plant families repeatedly stood out as being the most important from an ethnomedicinal perspective.

Highlights

It is well-documented in the scientific literature that plants have been used for medicinal purposes for the past 60,000 years (Solecki, 1975)
We considered all plant families with an inferior 95% probability credible interval higher than the one calculated for all species in Thailand (0.2362) as Most Important Medicinal Families (MIMFs) in this analysis
Using the relative regression residual (R), we identified a total of 22 MIMFs across Thailand

Summary

Introduction

It is well-documented in the scientific literature that plants have been used for medicinal purposes for the past 60,000 years (Solecki, 1975). Medicinal plants are often used on a regular basis in rural communities where pharmaceuticals are hard to obtain or even unavailable. This is in contrast to westernized societies where medicinal plants are typically used as an alternative or supplement to prescribed medicine (WHO, 2002). It is estimated that 67% of drugs used in chemotherapy are derived from natural products (Wangkheirakpam, 2018) This applies to the discoveries of active compounds such as vincristine (Raviña, 2011), taxol (Fischer et al, 2010), and artemisinin (Tu, 2011). Medicinal plants offer an opportunity for rural dwellers to generate a cash income (EL-Hilaly et al, 2003)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion