Effective materia medica in the treatment of epilepsy in traditional Iranian medicine

Epilepsy is an intermittent and sudden disorder of the nervous system due simultaneous discharge of brain neurons that leads to sensory disturbances and loss of consciousness and seizure movements. Currently, carbamazepine and sodium valproate are the most common antiepileptic drugs that associate with several side effects, but improve only 70% of epileptic patients. This issue necessitates the need for more efficient treatments. In traditional Iranian medicine epilepsy and its therapies are widely discussed. In this article, we study the effect of materia medica on epilepsy.
This study is a review article. The effective materia medica in treating epilepsy was searched in five textbooks on pharmacology of traditional Iranian medicine, including Alabnie and Haqayeq-al-advie, The Canon of medicine, Tazkare Davoud Antaki, Tohfat Al-momenin and Makhzan-al-advie. This study in several stages (Finding Keyword, Search in resources, preparation of single list, finding similarity, classification, collection and scoring, sorting by points) was done.
81 materia medica was found to treat epilepsy, among which 66 cases had a plant origin, 10 cases had an animal origin and the rest were of mineral origin. These materia medica were arranged in a table based on taken points. Effectiveness of some of these plants such as Nigella sativa, Pimpinella anisum, Caesalpinia bonduc, Terminalia chebula, Melissa officinalis, Ferula assa-foetida, Lavandula angustifolia and Ruta graveolens have been proven in animal or human studies.
Discussion & The obtained results in this study showed that materia medica can help to conduct future clinical trials to obtain new drugs with natural origin which are effective in epilepsy treatment.