Anthelmintic Activities (In Vitro And In Vivo) of Some Plant Extracts – A Review

Several plants are found to possess potent medicinal and phytochemical compounds used globally for the treatment of diseases and the discovery of new drugs. Plants with anthelmintic properties have attained a great interest due to their usage in treatment of parasitic (helminthic) diseases that cause major economic loss, resulting to reduced livestock production capacity of farmers. The major impediment in the livestock subsector is the increasing problems of development of resistance to synthetic drugs by the helminths and or high cost of commercially produced anthelmintics and their resultant side effects than the treatment efficacy in the host. Helminthosis is a clinical condition that represents one of the commonly encountered and most important diseases in ruminant farming. This clinical condition is aggravated by indiscriminate use of anthelmintics in an attempt to control the infection, thereby causing resistance of the parasitic helminths to synthetic drugs. This has led to the screening of plant extracts for their anthelmintic properties thereby serving as alternative strategies against gastrointestinal parasitic resistance. However, eighty percent of the world populations use natural plant compounds as anthelmintics for treatment of parasitic infections. Hence, the folkloric claims of the anthelmintic properties of plants extracts for the treatment of helminthes is necessarily important and of great interest. Therefore, this review unveils previous pharmacological and preliminary studies on plants as anthelmintics able to reduce helmintic infections and overcoming helminth parasite resistance.