uric acid reducing plants with xanthine oxidase inhibitory effects: (a mini review article)

Background: hyperuricemia is a common metabolic disorder of purines catabolism pathway that is associated with abnormal increases in uric acid levels. it is one of the important risk factors for gout and stress-oxidative related illness such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. objective: at present, allopurinol is used to treat it and the mechanism of this drug is to inhibit the enzyme xanthine oxidase (xo). in addition to side effects, this drug sometimes interacts with some other drugs. therefore, the tendency of patients has increased to use medicinal plants for treatment of these diseases as the effectiveness of some plant compounds has been proven in various studies. methods: in this study, uric acid reducing plants which had inhibitory properties on xo were reviewed. to get the comprehensive finding, keywords related to the subject of the study were searched in databases including: scopus, pubmed, google scholar, science direct, magiran and sid. results: our study showed, in order to inhibit xo enzyme and to be lowered uric acid levels by some plant families including asteraceae,  malvaceae, plantaginaceae, fabaceae, piperaceae, moraceae, asphodelaceae, lamiaceae, solanaceae, anacardiaceae, apiaceae, amaryllidaceae, tiliaceae, oxalidaceae, caricaceae, sapotaceae, arecaceae, sapindaceae, capparaceae, lauraceae, bignoniaceae, polygonaceae, calophyllaceae, magnoliaceae, portulacaceae and menispermaceae, a specific dose of compounds of natural products in a range of 100 to 5000 mg/kg is necessary. conclusion: the presences of phenolic compounds, especially polyphenols and flavonoids such as chlorogenic acid and luteolin have been predominantly considered as the most important natural antioxidants inhibiting xo enzyme to treat hyperuricemia.