Ethnobotanical study of medicinal and aromatic plants used by the population National Park of El Kala (north-eastern Algeria)

Abstract

An ethnobotanical study of medicinal plants was conducted in the National Park of El Kala (north-eastern Algeria) in the object to inventory of medicinal plants and gather all information on the therapeutic uses practised by local population in the studied region. Using 1 176 questionnaires form, ethnobotanical field surveys were conducted in nine towns of National Park of El Kala (N.P.E.K) and brought a sample of 60.03% women and 39.97% men, aged 18 to over 60 years with very high rate of illiteracy of 25.85%. Among this population, 69.62% prefer traditional medicine and 30.38% prefer modern medicine. The results of this study have enumerated 111 medicinal plants belonging to 56 families. The most dominate family is Lamiaceae. The foliage constituted the most used part (32.39%) and the majority of remedies are prepared as an infusion (38.96%). The mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus L.) is the most medicinal plant used by local people whose interest therapeutic is to relieve burns, intestinal inflammation, stomach aches and pains, cough and bronchitis, eyes diseases and hemorrhoid.The most treated diseases are gastrointestinal disease (20%), followed by circulatory and respiratory disease (10.64% for each one) and dermatological disorder (10.21). These results are a very important source of information for the studied area and for the national medicinal flora, which could be a source and database for the phytochemical and pharmacological research.

An ethnobotanical survey of spontaneous plants used in traditional medicine in the region of Aures, Algeria

“…These results find their explanation similar to the Chaouia rural family (Boutamine 2018) where the role of household management, of "caring for oneself and others" and "controlling the family budget" is mainly assigned to women to reduce the material costs induced by the doctor and the drugs. These results are in agreement with those obtained at a national scale by Bouallala et al (2014), Souilah et al (2018) and Chohra and Ferchichi (2019), and north African scale by Mehdioui and Kahouadji (2007), Jdaidi and Hasnaoui (2016) and Chaachouay et al (2019) who also stressed the important role of married women in traditional medicine.…”

“…These results indicate that the practice of phytotherapy as well as the acquisition of knowledge on the therapeutic virtues of plants is done traditionally and empirically. This profile, similar to that observed by Hamel et al (2018) and Souilah et al (2018) confirms that accumulated experience and family knowledge are the main sources of information. Furthermore, the small percentage of the youngest people, probably due to their reluctance or lack of interest in traditional medicine, shows a break in the transmission of knowledge as described by Anyinam (1995).…”

“…However, these values do not fully reflect the health profile of Algeria marked by a dominance of high blood pres-sure, diabetes, and joint diseases (MSPRH 2008). These somewhat different results can be explained by different factors such as the diet in the study area, consisting essentially of excessive consumption of pasta and tobacco which would cause digestive and respiratory diseases (Souilah et al 2018). According to these same authors, the very cold climate in winter can also explain respiratory diseases while respiratory disorder and skin diseases can be explained through allergies that can occur in contact with plants and pollen emissions.…”

Ethnobotanical survey of medicinal plants used by people cured of SARS-CoV-2 in the center of Algeria

“…The plants recorded in this study can be divided into three main groups. The first group is inspired by popular medicine as a remedy for cough and respiratory system diseases, such as Allium sativum, Marrubium vulgare (Meddour et al 2020), Allium cepa, Pinus halepensis (Bendif 2021), Pistacia lentiscus, Ocimum basilicum (Chohra & Ferchichi 2019), Eucalyptus globulus, Syzygium aromaticum (Souilah et al 2018), Origanum vulgare, and Salvia rosmarinus (Merouane et al 2022). The second group is inspired by Islamic culture, which is also the case in the majority of Muslim societies (Alqethami et al 2017, Aati et al 2019, such as Hordeum vulgare L. (Marwat et al 2012), Nigella sativa L. (Maideen 2020), Saussurea costus (Abdallah et al 2017), and Zingiber officinale (Rene et al 2014).…”