Sidr
Ziziphus spina-christi (Christ’s Thorn Jujube) is native to the Levant & East Africa and some tropical countries and over there it is called "Sidr"!
The extracts from Z. spina-christi could be useful in the treatment of nosocomial infections, opportunistic infection of the urinary tract (UTI), infantile gastroenteritis, travelers‟ diarrhea, meningitis and wounds infection (Asgarpanah & Haghighat, 2012).
It is used in Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan, Iraq, and Morocco against a wide range of illnesses, most of them associated with inflammation. Pharmacological research undertaken to date suggests that it possesses anti-inflammatory, hypoglycemic, hypotensive and anti-microbial effects. In most of the ancient Egyptian prescriptions the leaves were used.
If we consider the composed recipes including Ziziphus most of them appear ina context of visible swellings which are externally cured.
No distinction appears to be made between the use of the fruit, seed, leaves, branches, or bark. However there has been scientific studies studying the extracts of different parts of this plant.
Molecular docking studies on NF-κ B pathway proteins (that causes the inflammation) demonstrated that the active compounds of the plant,
shared comparable docking poses and binding energies with MG-132, a known NF-B inhibitor. (Pommerening et. al. ,2016)
Leaf extracts were cytotoxic toward HeLa (cervical cancer) and MDA-MB-468 (breast cancer) cell lines (Jafarian et al.2014). Z. spina-christi honey possesses cytotoxic activity toward HCT-116 (colon cancer), HTB-26 (breast cancer) and HepG2 (liver cancer) (El-Gendy 2010).