The Beneficial Role of Natural Antioxidants in Alleviating Neuroinflammatory Disorders Including Neurodegeneration

The inflammatory response is a highly self-regulated process that arises due to the common consequence of injury or infection and it has been observed that chronic inflammations cause tissue damage. The complexity of this process attracted huge scientific interest which deals with understanding inflammatory responses at their molecular level. Generally inflammatory response occurring within the brain and spinal cord is known as neuroinflammation. The severity of neuroinflammation is highly dependent on the type of disease, injury, infection, or stress while the duration and course of neuroinflammatory responses equally contribute to understand these processes and the subsequent physiological, biochemical, and behavioral changes. Neuroinflammatory responses are mediated by microglia which are the innate immune cells of the central nervous system (CNS). Many years of research support the fact that chronic inflammation along with increasing age increases the risk of progressive neurodegenerative diseases. Neuroinflammation and increasing oxidative stress form the basis of neuronal apoptosis ending up with synaptic loss leading to physiological and behavioral changes in the patients. Several natural compounds have been proven to possess a strong antioxidant effect that reduces neuroinflammation in many neurodegenerative diseases. In this review, we present the reports on few natural antioxidants which act against neuroinflammatory disorders while focusing on their molecular mechanism of action.