Abstract
The knowledge of the plants that are used may provide insight on their properties for further exploration. This study aimed to identify and collect data about medicinal plants used in traditional medicine by the population of the provincial region of Taza, Morocco. An ethnobotanical survey was carried out among 200 informants, competent villagers, herbalists, and traditional healers from the provincial region of Taza city through direct interviews using a structured questionnaire. The survey reported 55 plant species belonging to 28 families used in the folk medicine. Informants’ results showed that the most frequently used plants were Origanum compactum, Mentha pulegium, Rosmarinus officinalis L., Aloysia citrodora, Calamintha officinalis Moench, and Artemisia herba-alba Asso., with a relative frequency of citation of 76%, 72%, 60%, 42%, 40%, and 30%, respectively. Moreover, in this study, the Lamiaceae family was the most commonly reported plant family, and the leaves were the most frequently used parts of the plants; otherwise, decoction and infusion were the most used modes in the preparation of remedies from medicinal plants in the traditional medicine. The sociodemographic characteristics showed that women use medicinal plants slightly more than men, the illiterate people use the medicinal plant the most, and old people have more information about the medicinal plants than the new generations. The region of Taza of Morocco has an important floristic biodiversity of medicinal plants which are used in traditional medicine practice. This result provides a good database for pharmacological screening in the search for new plants that can contain new bioactive molecules that can be used as a bioactive ingredient of medicament or as a biological alternative in pharmacology.
1. Introduction
For a long time, plants have played a very important role in the daily lives of human life [1]. Herbal medicines have traditionally been used because of several benefits; they are affordable and easily accessible, and there is no evidence of resistance to whole plant extracts or of effectiveness [2]. This sort of traditional medicinal knowledge has been regularly practiced in homes and is transferred from generation to generation with the passage of time [3]. Nowadays, the use of plants as a way of treatment is still very important for many rural and urban Moroccans [4]. In recent decades, scientific studies have increasingly focused on plants used in traditional medicine to treat various diseases through botanical surveys and laboratory biological tests on animal models to discover certain species with medicinal properties that may replace certain chemical drugs with side effects [5, 6]. Morocco is a Mediterranean country which is crisscrossed from east to west and from southwest to northeast by four mountain ranges, the Rif, the Middle Atlas, the High Atlas, and the Anti-Atlas; his position between two seas and a vast desert results in a complete range of Mediterranean bioclimates. This varied climate provides habitat for rich and varied flora: more than 4200 spontaneous species and some 1500 introduced species have been catalogued [1, 7, 8]. The region of Taza is located between the mountain ranges of the Rif and the Middle Atlas; its climate is characterized by dry and very hot summer and cold, precipitating, and partly snowy winter. During the year, the temperature generally ranges from 5°C to 36°C and is rarely below 2°C or above 41°C. This climate makes this region very rich in plant biodiversity and in wide varieties of indigenous medicinal plants used by the local population in the folk medicine. To the best of our knowledge, few works in the literature were interested in this region. Thus, the aim of this work was to collect information about plant species used in folk medicine by the traditional healers and local population of this region to treat diseases and human pathologies. For these reasons, the current survey was conducted in the provincial area of Taza of Morocco (northeastern Morocco).
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Study Area
Taza city is administratively part of the Region of Fez-Meknes, it is located in the northeast of Morocco, and it is located in a mountain pass where the mountain range of the Rif and that of the Middle Atlas meet (Figure 1). Taza province is bordered to the north by the province of Al Hoceima, to the northeast by the province of Nador, to the east by the province of Taourirt, to the south by that of Boulemane, and to the west by the province of Taounate and that of Sefrou (latitude: 34°13′00″N, longitude: 4°01′00″W, and altitude: 550 m). This city covers an area of 37 km2 with a population of 148,456 inhabitants in 2014.
2.2. Ethnobotanical Survey
The first interview was conducted with the informants, giving them a brief explanation of the objective of the study and the importance of the information they were going to provide in order to sensitize them to participate in this study. In total, 200 people were interviewed directly between May and August 2016 through ethnobotanical surveys in different localities, cities, towns, villages, and douars in the province of Taza.
During the interviews, structured questionnaires were used for data documentation, 20 questionnaires for each zone, and the selected zones were dispersed between the city of Taza, the villages, and the douars of the Rif Mountains and the Middle Atlas belonging administratively to the province of Taza. Each questionnaire consisted of two parts. The first part concerns demographic information such as sex, age, educational level, source of information, and the profession of the participants, while the second part has informative questions on local names of plant species, mode preparation (decoction, maceration, infusion, etc.), the plant part used (stems, roots, leaves, seeds, aerial part, etc.), the method of administration, and the diseases treated by the plants mentioned by the informant. In each interview, the names of the plants were recorded in Moroccan Arabic when they were mentioned.
The botanical materials of 55 plant species were collected from the informants and kept in special glass frames; they were later identified by Pr. Abdelilah Rahou (Faculty of Sciences, Moulay Ismail University, Meknès). The confirmation was carried out by Dr. Mohamed Reda Kachmar using means of the literature.
These samples of plant materials were given herbarium specimen codes, and the voucher plant samples were kept in the Herbarium of the Botany Department of the Scientific Institute of Rabat, Morocco. The complete floristic list was established after the identification and verification of the samples; the identification process was realized using the following references: Moroccan Medicinal and Aromatic Plants [9], Vascular Flora of Morocco [10], Practical Flora of Morocco [10], and Traditional Moroccan Pharmacopoeia [11]. The taxonomy was confirmed on the basis of data available on the International Plant Names Index website: https://www.ipni.org/.
2.3. Ethnopharmacological Parameter Analysis
2.3.1. Relative Frequency of Citation
On the basis of the local therapeutic importance of each plant species, the relative frequency of citation (RFC) was calculated according to the following formula [12]:where FC is the number of participants who mentioned the use of a plant species and N is the total number of participants.
2.4. Statistical Analysis
The results obtained were processed and analysed using Excel 2010 software.
3. Results
3.1. Sociodemographic Characteristics
A total of 200 participants comprising herbalists, competent villagers, traditional healers, and normal people from Taza city, including 114 women (57%) and 86 men (43%), were interviewed. Their average age was 52 years with a minimum of 19 years and a maximum of 85 years. The majority of the informants belonged to the rural area (90%), and 61% were illiterate. The majority of participants received their education about herbal medicine from herbalists (54%), while the rest learned from their older family members or from other people (Table 1).
3.2. Medicinal Plants
3.2.1. Medicinal Plants Used by the Informants in the Treatment of Various Diseases
The survey reached 56 plant species used in the treatment of various diseases by the participants in the Taza region. The most used species were Origanum compactum with the highest RFC ratio (76%), followed by Mentha pulegium, Rosmarinus officinalis L., Aloysia citrodora, Calamintha officinalis Moench, and Artemisia herba-alba Asso., with the RFC value of 72%, 60%, 42%, 40%, and 30%, respectively (Table 2). The images of the plants with the highest RFC values are shown in Figure 2.
Plants were grouped into 28 families; this census also shows different routes of administration of the drugs, the preparation methods, and the part of the plants used in the traditional medicine as presented in Table 1. The most presented families were Lamiaceae (14 species), Apiaceae (6 species), Asteraceae (5 species), and Myrtaceae (3 species) followed by Cupressaceae, Lauraceae, and Zingiberaceae (2 species). All other families were presented by one species as shown in Figure 3.
3.3. Used Parts, Methods of Preparation, and Modes of Administration
Results obtained in this study showed that leaves were the most used part of the plants (57.35%) followed by the stems (13.23%), seeds (11.76%), roots (7.35%), flowers (5.88%), fruits (2.94%), and barks (1.47%) (Figure 4). Our survey also showed that decoction and infusion were the most used methods of preparation with frequencies of 29.11% and 27.84%, respectively, followed by the raw form (20.25%), powder form (17.72%), fumigation (3.79%), and vegetable oil (1.26%) (Figure 5). Oral administration of the drugs had the highest frequency (70%), while the other administration modes (brushing, rinsing, massage, and inhalation) presented the rest 30% (Figure 6).
4. Discussion
The main goal of this study is to identify the medicinal plants used in the province of Taza city. This region has an important and diversified heritage of aromatic and medicinal plants widely used in traditional medicine by the local population. This richness is also reflected by broad culture in phytotherapy and phytopharmacology among the selected informants, particularly herbalists and traditional healers.
Sociodemographic results showed that the age of all participants was between 20 and 86 years, and the most presented group of the informants having the age between 30 and 50 years (48%). The result also showed that females use medicinal plants a little bit more than males. Our results confirm those obtained by other ethnobotanical studies made in other regions in Morocco [7, 128]. This must be due to that women are in charge of drying, stocking of medicinal plants, and preparing recipes for the care of family members.
Interviews showed that older people are particularly competent than the young generation and had a greater knowledge of the uses of medicinal plants for the cure of various diseases; similar results were observed by other studies [30, 129]. However, this finding did not exclude other age groups with valuable knowledge about herbal remedies. In fact, older people are expected to provide more reliable information because they hold more ancestral knowledge transmitted orally. The transmission of this valuable knowledge and medicinal recipes from the old to the new generation is not always assured and is now in decline [129].
In this study, women were the most presented (57%) than men (43%). These results agree with those of a previous ethnobotanical study done in the province of Tata, Souss-Massa region in Morocco [19]. This study was led in the southeast region of Morocco, while our study was conducted in the northeast region of Morocco; these two regions differ by their geographical locations and their climatic zones and consequently a difference in their plant biodiversity, which obviously affects the choice of the plant’s species used in traditional medicine. Therefore, our survey showed that the most used plants in the Taza region were Origanum compactum, Mentha pulegium, Rosmarinus officinalis, Aloysia citrodora, Calamintha officinalis Moench, and Artemisia herba-alba Asso., while Artemisia huguetii, Mentha pulegium, Trigonella foenum-graecum, Mentha suaveolens, Lavandula mairei, and Nigella sativa were the most cited for their use in the traditional medicine in the study [19].
Results showed that 61% of the informants were illiterate, and their age was older than 40 years. These results are in agreement with other ethnobotanical studies carried out in Morocco [130] and Algeria [131]. The use of medicinal plants in traditional medicine is more widespread among illiterate people. These results are confirmed by other studies, which have shown that people with a lower level of education have more expertise in the uses of plants in traditional medicine [132, 133]. On the contrary, the results of this survey indicate the predominance of some plant families such as the Lamiaceae, the Apiaceae, and the Asteraceae. The predominance of these families has already been observed in a study carried out in another African country [134] and another study carried out in southeast Morocco [19]. Furthermore, the most used species by the population of Taza province were Origanum compactum with the highest RFC (76%), followed by Mentha pulegium, Rosmarinus officinalis, Aloysia citrodora Palau, Calamintha officinalis Moench, and Artemisia herba-alba Asso., with RFC values of 72%, 60%, 42%, 40%, and 30%, respectively. The medicinal properties that these plants have were experimentally proven by several studies carried out in vivo and/or in vitro by [135–141]. The plants used mainly by the population of the Taza region are almost the same as those previously mentioned in Morocco [4, 7] and in Algeria [142].
The use of leaves in traditional medicine could be attributed to their availability, the simplicity of their harvest, and their richness in therapeutic substances [143]. On the contrary, decoction was the most used method of preparing medicinal plants (29.11%) followed by infusion (27.84%), the raw form (20.25%), the powder form (17.72%), fumigation (3.79%), and the vegetable oil form (1.26%). This observation is in agreement with other ethnobotanical studies [57], which indicate that the recipes were essentially prepared by decoction, about 67% of herbal preparations were in the liquid form, and water was the solvent of choice in the preparation of herbal recipes because it is abundant and easy to access. The vast majority of remedies were taken orally (70%); similar results have been obtained in other studies [7, 57].
5. Conclusion
This study showed that Taza region has a rich and varied patrimony of medicinal plant species used in the folk medicine to treat different diseases. In fact, the traditional recipes based on those plants must be validated and grouped into databases to become as a source for alternative therapeutic compounds, and their use must be conducted by safety and efficacy data, especially for herbalists and traditional healers. Nonetheless, chemical, pharmacological, and toxicological investigations in the medicinal plant area are required to determine and confirm their chemical composition and clinical uses to standardize their correct therapeutic doses.
Data Availability
The data used to support the findings of this study are included within the article.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.