Sanguinarine
chemical compound
Sanguinarine is a polycyclic quaternary alkaloid. It is extracted from some plants, including the bloodroot plant (Sanguinaria canadensis, from whose scientific name its name is derived), the Mexican prickly poppy (Argemone mexicana), Chelidonium majus, and Macleaya cordata.
Toxicity
Sanguinarine is a toxin that kills animal cells through its action on the Na+/K+-ATPase transmembrane protein. Epidemic dropsy is a disease that results from ingesting sanguinarine.
If applied to the skin, sanguinarine may cause a massive scab of dead flesh where it killed the cells where it was applied, called an eschar. For this reason, sanguinarine is termed an escharotic.
It is said to be 2.5 times more toxic than dihydrosanguinarine.
Alternative medicine
Native Americans once used bloodroot as a medical remedy, believing it had curative properties as an emetic, respiratory aid, and for a variety of ailments. In Colonial America, sanguinarine from bloodroot was used as a wart remedy. Later, in 1869, William Cook's The Physiomedical Dispensatory included information on the preparation and uses of sanguinarine.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sanguinarine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.