Herbal Medicine Helps Reduce Insomnia

The side effects of treatment, medicines you are taking, long hospital stays, stress, and other factors may cause sleep problems.

Studies show that as many as half of all people have sleep-related problems during treatment for cancer.

Sleeping well is important for your physical and mental health. A good night’s sleep may help you to think more clearly, lower your blood pressure, help your appetite, and strengthen your immune system.

Sleep problems that go on for a long time may increase the risk of anxiety or depression.

The herb Ziziphi Spinosae Semen (ZSS) is a common natural medicine used to treat insomnia, and to show clearly its method of action, Gong et al., (2021) managed and did an in-depth discussion.

Network pharmacology research is very suitable for the analysis of multiple components, multiple targets, and multiple pathways of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

According to the relevant theory, we first carefully collected and screened the active ingredients in ZSS and received 11 active ingredients that may work.

The targets going along with these active components were also strongly related to insomnia targets, 108 common genes were identified, and drug-compound-gene symbol-disease visualization network and protein-protein interaction network were constructed.

Forty-eight core genes were identified by PPI analysis and subjected to GO functional analysis with KEGG pathway analysis.

The results of GO analysis pointed that there were 998 gene ontology items for the treatment of insomnia, including terms of 892 biological processes, 47 cellular components, and 59 molecular functions.

It mainly shows the coupling effect and transport mode of some proteins in the biological pathways of ZSS in the treatment of insomnia and explains the mechanism of action through the connection between the target and the cell biomembrane.

KEGG enrichment analyzed 19 signaling pathways, which were collectively classified into seven categories.

They identified the potential pathways of ZSS against insomnia and obtained the regulatory relationship between core genes and pathways and know that the same target can be regulated by multiple components at the same time.

The results of molecular docking also prove this conclusion.

Reference:

Neurotransmitters, Synaptic Plasticity, Circulating Extracellular Vesicles, and Epigenetics in Herbal Therapies of Depression. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2021 Volume 202 https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/9888607