Plant-Derived Hemostats

Bleeding due to accidents, trauma, war-field causalities, and surgical process may lead to death when it is uncontrollable. In this scenario, hemostats could be the most effective tool, which could stop such bleeding rapidly. Several polymer-based materials have been explored for these purposes, few of them are already commercialized. Besides those, plants-derived extracts have shown their promises as effective hemostatic agents. Since long back, several plants have been traditionally used for this purpose over the globe. In general, whole plant or its parts, i.e., leaves, flower, fruit, root, and rhizome, are extracted through various techniques like maceration, decoction, and soxhlation, even more advanced techniques like microwave extraction for better yields of active components. Crude extract/fraction/isolated compounds have been explored for hemostatic properties in vitro and in vivo. Bleeding time, clotting time, prothrombin time, and activated partial thromboplastin time are the different parameters to evaluate such properties. This review comprehensively discussed such efforts to explore plant-derived extract as hemostatic agents and mechanism of hemostasis, and finally, discussed the limitations of present knowledge and future perspectives.