Evidence for Health-Promoting Properties of Lepidium sativum L.: An Updated Comprehensive Review

Lepidium sativum L. is a common herb distributed worldwide, used as a food ingredient and therapeutic agent in traditional medicine for treating health-related disorders. L. sativum and its extracts have been described to possess numerous biological activities including antimicrobial, antidiabetic, antioxidant, antidiarrheal, anticancer, and numerous health-promoting effects in in vivo and in vitro studies. The purpose of this review is to summarize the findings describing important biological functions and therapeutic effects of L. sativum in various cell lines and animal models. In this review, the English-language articles were gathered from electronic databases including Web of Science, PubMed and Google Scholar with no time limit applied to any database. The search terms used in this review include, "Lepidium sativum L." and/or "chemical composition", "health benefits", "antimicrobial", "antioxidant", "anticancer", "diuretic", "nephro-protection", "antidiarrheal", "antidiabetic", "anti-asthmatic", "neuroprotection", "metabolic", "bone fracture", and "reproductive performance". Additional and eligible studies were collected from reference lists of appropriate articles. The information presented will be helpful to attract more interest toward medicinal plants by defining and developing novel clinical applications and new drug formulations in the future. Pre-clinical studies showed that L. sativum possesses potent health-promoting effects involving various molecular mechanisms. Taken all together, data suggested that identified herbal plants such as L. sativum, can be exploited as nutritional and therapeutic agents to combat various ailments. Despite much research in this field, further comprehensive in vitro/in vivo studies and clinical trials are needed to identify the mechanisms underlying the biological and therapeutic activities of L. sativum.