ISBN-13: 9783659884672 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 176 str.
Herbal drugs have reached widespread acceptability as therapeutic agents for diabetics, arthritics, liver diseases, cough remedies and memory enhancers. Patients often take herbal products in combination with therapeutic drugs and most of them do not inform physicians on the use of herbal supplements. When medicinal herbal therapies are co-administered with prescription drugs, there is an increasing risk of clinical treatment failure and adverse toxicity due to drug-herb interactions. Herbs contain multiple components, many of which have unknown biological activity. These constituents can potentially mimic, increase or decrease the effects of co-administered prescription drugs resulting in synergistic or antagonistic effects through simultaneous interaction on the same therapeutic target or by affecting the metabolic stability of these drugs. Drugs with particularly narrow therapeutic windows are prone to adverse interactions with herbal products. CYP450 enzyme system is the main catalyzer of oxidative metabolism. As a result, CYPs have been shown to be involved in numerous interactions between drugs, nutrients and medicinal herbs