Studies on active substances in herbs used for oketsu ("stagnant blood") in Chinese medicine. VI. On the anticoagulative principle in paeoniae radix.

The anticoagulative principles in Paeoniae Radix, which is one of the most important herbs and is used commonly for the treatment of female diseases in traditional oriental medicine, were investigated. In this study the measurement of plasma recalcification time in mice was found to be useful for following the anticoagulative activity of the material, and the active principles were isolated from the water extract of the herb by a combination of a partition and repeated silica gel column chromatographies.