Traditional Chinese medicine treatment of asthma: From the insight on programmed cell death.
Yao D, Du Y, Yuan X, Qian Z, Fang Y
Medicinal Plants
Herbs that traditional healers have prescribed for lung conditions for centuries are now being mapped to the exact molecular switches they flip — and several of those plants are candidates for a medicinal garden of your own.
Researchers reviewed decades of studies on how plant-based Chinese herbal medicines help people with asthma. They found these herbal compounds work by controlling how lung and immune cells live and die, dialing down the inflammation and airway scarring that make asthma so debilitating. The findings give scientific grounding to healing traditions that have used plants like these for thousands of years, and point toward which plant compounds might be developed into new asthma treatments.
Key Findings
TCM plant compounds regulate apoptosis in asthma through the Bax/Bcl-2/caspase-3 and PI3K/Akt signaling axes, reducing damaging airway inflammation at the molecular level.
Herbal compounds suppress two additional cell-death pathways — autophagy (via PI3K/Akt/mTOR inhibition) and ferroptosis (via the GPX4/SLC7A11 axis) — and block the NLRP3 inflammasome to prevent pyroptosis.
Despite coverage of four major programmed cell death types, TCM-based regulation of necroptosis in asthma remains largely unstudied, representing a clear gap for future research.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A comprehensive review finds that plant-derived Traditional Chinese Medicine compounds treat asthma by modulating five distinct programmed cell death pathways in lung tissue, providing molecular-level explanations for centuries-old herbal therapies.
Abstract Preview
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a time-honored and holistic practice that is used to treat various diseases. The extensive medicinal properties of TCM, particularly Chinese herbal medicines (...
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