Dogbane family (Apocynaceae)
Features:
- It is an evergreen perennial subshrub.
- Its crawling shoots are rooting.
- Its leaves are elliptic, glabrous, leathery, glossy, and transversely opposite. Some of its horticultural varieties have white-edged leaves, and others marbled leaves.
- Its flowers are purplish blue, with five pinwheel-like petals, composing the corolla. Other flower colours (white, burgundy, purple) can be found too, in horticultural varieties. Its fruits are double follicles.
Habitat: Semiarid or fresh hornbeam and oak woods, groves.
Medicinal use:
Both Vincamine, a substance extracted from periwinkle, and the medicine developed later from it that contains vinpocetine, have vasodilating effect. This medicinal product serves for the treatment of certain diseases associated with cerebral circulatory disorders. It also serves to ease psychological or neurological symptoms and treat some circulatory insufficiency-based ophthalmological and otological problems. As an ingredient in other preparations, it is an antihypertensive, diuretic medicine.
Curiosities:
Richter Gedeon’s vinpocetine-containing formulation was patented in 1977, thanks to the fruitful work of László Szporny, Egon Kárpáti, and Lilla Forgács, the pharmaceutical researchers who were working at the Kőbánya Pharmaceutical Factory (Richter Gedeon PLC) at the time.
