World Health Organization rated depression as the fourth health concern worldwide. Epidemiologic studies showed that life-long prevalence of major depression is 10-25% in women and 5-12% in men.
Anti depressant medications are among the principles of depression treatment. Treatment with these medications showed that it can lead to improvement in symptoms and reversing psycho-social performance and prevent the recurrence of disease. However, they have many side effects, and since regular consumption of them is not well tolerated by the patients, there is a high tendency to use herbal medicines all around the world recently.
Monzej Soda Booali Daroo syrup contains spistan, jujube, borage, Dracocephalum, liquorice, Maidenhair, anise, fumitory, lavender, gulkand, which are used in sources of the traditional medicine for the treatment of choleric diseases, depression, and anxiety.
These medications have approximately desirable effects on mental diseases, and these effects are individually confirmed in various studies. It was pointed in Tohaf ol-Hakim that Echium induced warm humor, and is effective on the treatment of choleric diseases, pleurisy, meningitis, psychosis and hypochondria. Echium is an herbal medicine pointed in traditional medicine sources named Lesan Al-thour, which is also pointed in Iranian traditional medicine as anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, general booster of body, specifically for heart, anti-coughing, and for the treatment of choleric diseases. According to traditional medicine textbooks, a combination of cooked liqourice, caper, polypody, dracocephalum, gooseberry, anise, naked ladies, and gulkand can be used for relief of choleric humor. Using dracocephalum, as an anti-depressant medication, was frequent until 17th century. Accordingly, at this time, Koulpeper, the British phytopathologist, claimed that this herb can remove all the discomforts and undesirable thoughts from brain caused by black bile and melancholia.
New experiments conducted on animals confirm that the sedative effects of dracocephalum are due to the similarity of its action on central nervous system as an analgesic. Phytopathologists and herbalists prescribe dracocephalum oil to relieve depression, worry, dysphoria and tension headaches. Also, a study was conducted to investigate the efficacy of using aqueous extract of Echium in the treatment of patients with mild-to-moderate major depression in a 6-week period. 35 patients were randomly allocated into two groups of 375 mg of Echium extract or placebo. The findings showed that at last weeks, Echium extract was better than placebo, which this difference was statistically significant by passing four weeks from the treatment. A study investigated the effect of lavender in comparison to 20 mg Citalopram in Shahr-E-Kurd. In this clinical trial, 80 patients with depression were randomly allocated into two groups as below. First group received 20 mg Citalopram twice daily and second group received two cups of brewed lavender daily for a duration of four-week. Mean scores of depression were investigated based on Hamilton scale before and after the intervention. According to the findings of this study, lavender has positive effects in the treatment of depression and can be used alone or with other medications as supplement. One study investigated the effect of the aqueous extract of dracocephalum in comparison to two medications 20mg-flouxetine and 15mg Imipramine on Wistar rats. In this study, dracocephalum with doses of 25, 75, 150 and 300 mg/kg was used as well as the distilled water as placebo. At the end of the study, findings showed that all doses of dracocephalum, specifically the highest dose, have anti-depressant activity similar to Imipramine, which may have potential clinical value. Abnormal increase in choleric humor in the body results in choleric diseases in all organs, which can lead to fibroids, Parkinson’s Disease, Blood sugar and hyperthyroidism.