Natural Plant Antioxidants and Cardiovascular Disease

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular disorders are one of the main causes of death worldwide. The pathogenic mechanism and common nexus of chronic pathologies and chronic inflammation is oxidative stress. Oxidative damage has been implicated in the etiology or pathology of cardiovascular diseases including endothelial dysfunction, atherosclerosis, hypertension, heart failure, and is involved in metabolic syndrome and obesity, responsible for a rise in stroke incidence among young adults.
In recent years, the study of the beneficial effect on human health of the consumption of antioxidants contained in natural products has become very relevant. Among the components of these products with greater antioxidant capacity are polyphenols and flavonoids. There are more than thousands of species for which folk medicine describes different uses in the care and preservation of health. Studies have been carried out on the potential properties of the flora, plants and their aqueous and/or ethanolic extracts.

The increasingly frequent use of phytochemicals determines the importance of running studies with the purpose of evaluating their properties, which facilitates the enrichment of the cultural interpretation of the popular use of different plants when investigating possible biological effects. The use of natural antioxidants for the treatment of different pathologies is based on a long popular tradition, with empirical evidence, but with little scientific literature to support it from the point of view of basic or clinical studies.

This Research Topic offers the opportunity to revise the importance of compounds derived from natural plants with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties on cardiovascular diseases. Our main goal is to offer a collection of high quality papers including reviews and original research that increase the knowledge about the effect of bioactive compounds present in plants or food on vascular biology. We also include accurate methods of evaluating antioxidant activity/capacity and reactive oxygen species generation.

The aspects we would like to uncover are:

• Bioactive compounds derived from natural plants and cardiovascular diseases.
• Functional Food and cardiovascular diseases
• Metabolic Syndrome and its treatment with bioactive compounds.
• Effect of bioactive compounds on endothelial dysfunction.
• Importance of natural antioxidants in chronic inflammation and its regulation.
• Measurement of Reactive Oxygen Species generation and antioxidant capacity.
• Structure - activity relationships (SAR) and Quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSARs) studies of bioactive compounds.
• NADPH-oxidase system and natural bioactive compounds.
• Therapeutic uses of bioactive compounds derived from plants.