Flavonoids as potential anti-asthmatic agents

Asthma affects approximately 260 million people globally and causes an estimated 450,000 deaths annually, posing a serious threat to human health and life quality. Current mainstay pharmacotherapies are effective for symptom control but are associated with well-documented systemic side effects and do not offer a cure. Flavonoids have garnered increasing scientific interest due to their pleiotropic biological activities; however, there is still a lack of summary on the mechanism of flavonoids in key pathological processes of asthma. This review summarizes the evidence on how flavonoids modulate key asthma pathologies, covering airway inflammation, T cell subset imbalance, airway remodeling, and smooth muscle contractility. However, clinical translation is severely constrained by poor solubility, rapid metabolism, and low oral bioavailability. Flavonoids exhibit multi-target therapeutic potential for asthma, but well-designed, large-scale clinical trials are necessary to validate these preclinical observations.