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

BACKGROUND: The application of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the treatment of fatigue has long been practiced in clinical and showed significant effects. OBJECTIVE: 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. METHOD: Research status, sources, models, efficacy and mechanisms of active ingredients and their monomer in the treatment of fatigue are discussed. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSION: 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.