Papers of the Week

Sciatica is a common back pain caused by irritation of the sciatic nerve. Current pharmacologic therapies have proven inadequate for many patients with sciatic pain. On the other hand, there is a global increasing demand toward the use and administration of natural medicaments for this disorder. Traditional Persian Medicine (TPM) is a school of medicine and a medicinal plant based resource for clinical studies put forward by Persian scholars. The aim of the present study is to gather and study the effectiveness of all medicinal plants from five main Persian pharmacopeias. Furthermore, different data bases such as PubMed and Scopus have been checked to derive relevant activities for these plants. In all, 99 medicinal plants related to 42 families have been authenticated. Asteraceae and Apiaceae were the most frequent families and Roots and Seeds were the most reported botanical parts. The employed routs of administration were oral (54%), topical (33%) and rectal (13%). Anti-inflammatory, analgesic activity and anti-nociceptive properties of medicines are known as some main mechanisms to manage sciatic pain. These functions are possessed by 30%, 15%, and 15% of the studied plants, respectively. Medicaments that can be introduced as lead agents for further investigation are Zingiber officinale Roscoe, Olea europaea L., Strychnos nux-vomica L and Artemisia vulgaris L which showed all of these properties in previous studies. Hence, conducting adducible clinical trials using these lead agents may lead to novel drugs with lesser undesirable and much more therapeutic effects on controlling sciatic pain.