Phytotherapeutics in Inflammatory Lung Diseases

Abstract

Inflammatory lung diseases such as asthma can be defined as a widely spread chronic inflammatory disease presented with airway hyperresponsiveness, mucus hypersecretion, and remodeling. These diseases may be triggered by genetic predisposition or allergen. Patients are manifested with recurrent episodes of dyspnea, wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness, and cough. Conventional therapies used to treat inflammatory lung diseases suffer from limited patient adherence due to their high cost and side effects. Medicinal plants are gaining considerable attention by health care providers due to their favorable therapeutic role, limited side effects, and their potential to be used as adjuvant therapies in the management of inflammatory lung diseases. This book chapter is a summary of pharmacologically studied plant extracts, fractions, and isolated compounds as anti-inflammatory lung diseases agents, especially asthma in different in vitro and in vivo models in the past decade (2010-2020). We also highlighted the medicinal plants, fractions, and isolated compounds with their pharmacological and immunological mechanism of action.