Carvacrol and its effect on cardiovascular diseases: From molecular mechanism to pharmacological moduclation

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) affect worldwide and influence people from diverse cultures, socioeconomic status, ethnicities, and healthcare systems. The underlying pathogenesis of CVD predominately includes atherosclerotic plaques, which further lead to coronary artery disease and peripheral vascular diseases, resulting in stroke, arrhythmias, myocardial infarction, and many more. Conventional pharmacological therapies that treat CVDs are costly and have numerous side effects. Despite the effectiveness of these therapies, remarkable gaps remained in the treatment of CVDs. Consequently, traditional herbs and phytomedicines have revived interest as natural remedies. Phenolic monoterpene, carvacrol, was reported to have numerous pharmacological applications. This review aims to provide comprehensive, categorized, and updated mechanisms by which carvacrol shows its cardioprotective effect in various heart illnesses to analyze its therapeutic ability. Comprehensive literature forage was carried out, and the available information regarding carvacrol and CVDs was retrieved using scientific electronic search (PubMed, Google Scholar, and Web of Science). In this review, we focused on the therapeutic role and underlying mechanism of carvacrol in CVDs as per existing literature evidence. We highlighted the benefits of carvacrol in myocardial infarction, cardiac hypertrophy, hypertension, cardiac arrhythmia, sepsis-induced cardiomyopathy, drug-induced cardiotoxicity, and stroke/cerebral ischemic/reperfusion injury and enumerated the potential mechanism of action. Carvacrol may have shown efficacy against various CVDs by antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Further detailed studies are required to translate the carvacrol from preclinical candidate to clinical hope.