Importance of ethnomedical information for discovery of antifungal plants: A collaborative study in Latin America

SVETAZ, L.; DI LIBERTO, M.; DERITA, M. G.; PETENATTI, E.; TAMAYO, G.; CECHINEL FILHO, V.; GIMENEZ, A.; PINZÓN, R.; ZACCHINO, S. A.; GUPTA, M.

Cuiaba

Simposio; IV Simpósio Iberoamericano de Plantas Medicinais; 2009

Fungal infections in immunocompromised patients have increased in the past decades leading to high morbidity and mortality. Clinical antifungal drugs show toxicity, produce recurrence or develop resistance due to their intensive use. There is an urgent need of new compounds for antifungal therapy. Plants provide unlimited opportunities for the isolation of new antifungal compounds because of the unmatched availability of chemical diversity. But the first important concern is the selection of species to be submitted to screening. This multinational study sponsored by the Organization of American States reports the antifungal evaluation of 330 plant species (95 families, 259 genera) from seven Latin American countries, 145 with history of ethnopharmacological use related to fungal infections (PAU) and 185 chosen at random (PNAU). The aim of this study was to investigate whether the probability of detecting antifungal plants are higher in the PAU than in the PNAU group. Material and Methods: The microbroth dilution assay of the Clinical & Lab Standards Institute (CLSI, formerly NCCLS)[1] was used against a panel of eleven fungi. For the statistic analysis the Chi Square test was used. Results and Discussion: A significant higher probability of detecting plants with antifungal activity against at least one fungus was found within the PAU (40 %) than the PNAU group (20.5 %) (p < 0.01). (b) A similar higher probability than in (a) (39.3 % vs. 20 %) was found when plants were tested against dermatophytes (p < 0.01) but not against yeasts or Aspergillus spp. (p > 0.05). Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the ethnopharmacological approach is useful in guiding the discovery of antifungal Latin American antifungal plants mainly against dermatophytes which are the cause of the superficial mycoses whose cure can be easily observed by traditional healers.