Nigella Sativa Essay

THERAPEUTICS EFFECTS OF NIGELLA SATIVA ON ATHEROSCLEROSIS
ABSTRACT
Nigella Sativa (NS) is a scientific name given to black cumin or black seeds plants. In Arabic, it is called as ‘Habatul Sauda’ while in Southeast Asia, it is known as Kalonji. NS have been used as natural medicines for centuries in Middle East and Southeast Asia to encourage good health and treat many ailment including chronic health conditions. Volatile oil of NS had been found to have major active component of thymoquinone; comprise 30% of the volatile oil of NS by most of the recent reports via different chromatography techniques. A lot of studies have been conducted on the effects of NS seeds extracts particularly on major risk factors of atherosclerosis; effects on diabetes mellitus, blood pressure and heart rate and high level of lipid.
Keywords: nigella sativa, thymoquinone, atherosclerosis, diabetes mellitus, lipid, hypertension
INTRODUCTION
Nigella Sativa (NS) is a scientific name given to black cumin or black seeds plants. In Arabic, it is called as ‘Habatul Sauda’ while in Southeast Asia, it is known as Kalonji. NS is a member of Ranunculaceae botanical family and it is widely grown to various countries in Eastern Europe, Western Asia and the Middle East annually cultivated as

A lot of studies had been done on animal models and a few on humans to identify the pharmacological properties of NS. Chemical compounds contained in the NS seeds especially volatile oil, played a big role of pharmacological action in encountering hypertension, diabetes and high level of lipids in blood, showing that NS seeds are highly potential medicinal plants to cure cardiovascular disease and as antihypertensive drug as stated by Ali & Blunden (2003) and suitable in treating disorder of cardiovascular as agreed by Dehkordi & Kamkhah