Comparison of the Effect of Garlic and Thyme Plants on Candida albicans: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

With the increased prevalence of candidiasis in recent years, the use of herbal medicines including garlic and thyme is considered to treat Candida albicans infection. We sought to compare the effectiveness of garlic and thyme on Candida albicans infection using a systematic review and meta-analysis.

IranMedex, PubMed, Google scholar, Magiran and SID databases were searched and 12 experimental articles performed in Iran were retrieved. Data were extracted using STATA software (version 12.2) and analyzed by meta-analysis and random effects model.

Findings: The overall sample size of the 12 articles was 276. In five papers, the effectiveness of garlic in the inhibition of Candida albicans was considered, and the values of minimum inhibition concentration (MIC) 90 and 50 were 0.062 and 0.0312 mg/ml, respectively. In seven papers, the inhibitory effect of thyme against Candida albicans was considered, and the MIC 90 and MIC50 values were 2. With the combination of P-value obtained by the Fisher’s exact test in the mentioned studies, we noted that garlic and thyme had significant inhibitory effects against Candida albicans (P<0.001).

Considering the low MIC50 and MIC90 of garlic compared to thyme, it can be stated that garlic is more effective in inhibiting Candida albicans than thyme