Anti-fatigue Effects of Active Ingredients from Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Review

The application of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the treatment of fatigue has long been practiced in clinical and showed significant effects.This article summarizes the work done on the natural products from TCM that are reported to have effects of treating fatigue, in the past two decades.Research status, sources, models, efficacy and mechanisms of active ingredients and their monomer in the treatment of fatigue are discussed.Pharmacological research shows that active ingredients of polysaccharide can significantly improve body's resistance through promoting glycogen synthesis, reducing sports metabolites and increasing hypoxia tolerance; Alkaloids have been proven to be effective in promoting the reserving of various glucogen substances, improving exercise endurance and speeding up the metabolism of body's urea nitrogen in mice; With the increase of glycosides amount, up goes the sport endurance, liver glycogen content and the ability of clear lactate index in mice, indicating that saponin has clear, dose-dependent anti-fatigue effect; Polyphenols have also functions of resisting fatigue, where they reduce free radicals accumulated and thus slow down the rapid declination of exercise capacity when doing sports; There are other active ingredients of TCM that have biological activities, like some proteins, anthraquinones, terpenes, unsaturated fatty acid monomer compounds; And research has found that tonic medicine can promote the elimination of fatigue and improve athletic ability.It is hoped that the data summarized in this review will be beneficial to the screening of new nature-derived drugs with the ability of relieving and improving fatigue.