The Role of Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicines and Bioactive Ingredients on Ion Channels: A Brief Review and Prospect

Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCMs), particularly the Chinese herbal medicines, are valuable sources of medicines and have been used for centuries. The term “TCMs” both represents to the single drug agent like Salvia miltiorrhiza, Ligusticum chuanxiong and Angelica sinensis, and those herbal formulas like Jingshu Keli, Wenxin Keli and Danzhen powder. In recent years, the researches of TCMs developed rapidly to understand the scientific basis of these herbs. In this review, we collect the studies of TCM and their containing bioactive compounds, and attempt to provide an overview for their regulatory effects on different ion channels including Ca2+, K+, Na+, Cl- channels and TRP, P2X receptors. The following conditions are used to limit the range of our review. (i) Only the herbal materials are included in this review and the animal- and mineral-original TCMs are excluded. (ii) The major discussions in this review focus on single TCM agent and the herbal formulas are only discussed for a little. (iii) Those most famous herbal medicines like Capsicum annuum (pepper), Curcuma longa (ginger) and Cannabis sativa (marijuana) are excluded. (iv) Only those TCM herbs with more than 5 research papers confirming their effects on ion channels are discussed in this review. Our review discusses recently available scientific evidences for TCMs and related bioactive compounds that have been reported with the modulatory effects on different ion channels, and thus provides a new ethnopharmacological approach to understand the usage of TCMs.