Biological evaluation of plants of Laos used in the treatment of tuberculosis in Lao traditional medicine

Abstract

Tuberculosis has existed in Southeast Asia for thousands of years. Many traditional treatments involve herbal remedies. Over time, these traditional treatments have had the chance to become refined based on efficacy and safety. It was therefore hypothesized that plants that were used in the past and are still used today to treat symptoms associated with tuberculosis are more likely to contain anti-tubercular compounds than plants that have not been used continuously. To try to deduce which plants were used in Laos in the past, a collection of palm leaf manuscripts was studied and a list of plants used to treat symptoms associated with tuberculosis was compiled. Interviews were then conducted with contemporary healers to see if the same plants are still being used today. Plants that were found in the manuscripts and/or are presently used by healers were collected, extracted and were evaluated in an anti-tubercular assay. This paper presents the methods used to identify and collect plants used to treat symptoms indicative of tuberculosis, and the results of anti-TB assays to test for activity.

Keywords::

• Ethnomedicine
• Laos
• mycobacteria
• palm leaf manuscript
• Tham

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor Justin McDaniel at the University of California, Riverside for linguistic advice, and to Professor Norman R. Farnsworth at the University of Illinois at Chicago for access to the Napralert database. We also express thanks to Marcelle Hon at the Institute for Tuberculosis Research at UIC for assistance in IC₅₀ analyses. We are indebted to traditional healers of Laos and monastic and lay people at Buddhist temples throughout Laos who helped to direct us. The study was financially supported by the Soejarto Senior University Scholar Fund, as well as ICBG Grant 2-U01-TW001015-09-10, through funds from the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, and Foreign Agricultural Service of the United States Department of Agriculture.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.