Annual advances in traditional medicine for tumor therapy in 2019

Today, the treatment of tumors remains a difficult problem. Traditional medicine has been used to treat cancer in different countries worldwide. However, while traditional medicine is popular globally, it is not yet accepted by Western medicine as some of the ingredients and the mechanism of action for the therapeutic effect have not been fully elucidated. Thus, scholars studying traditional medicine in the treatment of cancer have strived to solve this problem. In this review, we summarized the research progress of several traditional medicines used as tumor therapies in 2019 from the PubMed database. Studies of tumors treated with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are popular worldwide and obtain the most attention, which attracts more researchers to this field. The anti-tumor effects of Chinese herbal medicine-derived phytochemicals, such as polyphenols, polysaccharides, saponins, and alkaloids were the new research targets for 2019. The anti-tumor effects of TCM formula such as Sijunzi decoction, and Xiaopi formula have attracted the most attention in the past year. In addition to TCM, we also focused on the anti-tumor studies of other traditional medicines, including Thai traditional medicine, traditional medicine in Sri Lanka, traditional African medicine, traditional Korean medicine, and traditional Japanese medicine.