A review on garcinia kola heckel: traditional uses, phytochemistry, pharmacological activities, and toxicology

Abstract

Purpose

Garcinia kola is a medicinal plant commonly known as bitter kola. It is utilised in ethnomedicine for the treatment of diarrhoea, bronchitis, bacterial infection, cough, hepatitis, gonorrhoea, laryngitis, food poison, liver and gastric diseases.

Objective

This study reviewed the phytochemistry, pharmacological activities, and ethnomedicinal potentials of G. kola.

Materials and methods

An extensive review was performed using electronic literature collated from ScienceDirect, Springer, Wiley, and PubMed databases.

Results

Phytochemical analysis revealed the isolation of several chemical compounds including 9-octadecenoic acid, linoleic acid, 14-methylpentadecanoic acid, 1-butanol, hexadecanamide, I-4′,II-4′,I-5,II-5,I-7,II-7-hexahydroxy-I-3,II-8-biflavanone, lanost-7-en-3-one, kolaflavanone (8E)-4-geranyl-3,5-dihydroxybenzophenone, glutinol, Garcinia biflavonoid (GB-2a-II-4′-OMe), 9,19-cyclolanost-24-en-3-ol, 24-methylene, tirucallol, lupeol, β–amyrin, obtusifoliol and Kolaviron. Diverse pharmacological in-vivo and in vitro investigations revealed that G. kola has anti-inflammatory, antimalarial, hepatoprotective, cardioprotective, anti-asthmatic, neuroprotective, antioxidant, and antidiabetic activities.

Conclusion

The present study revealed that G. kola has preventive and therapeutic potentials against various diseases in both in vivo and in vitro studies and therefore can be utilised as a raw material in the pharmaceutical industries for the development of therapeutic products. However, there is a need for clinical trial experiments to validate and provide accurate and substantial information on the required safe dosage and efficacy for the treatment of several diseases.

Keywords:

• Garcinia kola
• phytochemistry
• pharmacological
• toxicology

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.