At the beginning of a new millennium, several important questions have come to the fore connected with the utilization of natural resources for the investigation of new medicaments (necessity of cooperation of both highly developed and developing countries in the protection of natural resources, necessity to justly evaluate and reward the contributions of the individual cultures in the case that a knowledge of traditional medicine was employed in the development of a new medicament, necessity to achieve the maximal chemical variety of real and virtual libraries of substances from which potential drugs are selected for screening tests). The research of chalcones and its analogues which are relatively easily available not only by isolation from natural material, but also by the methods of classical and combinatorial synthesis should not be substantially affected by the above-described changes. The present communication links up with previous papers (Opletalová,V., Šedivý, D.: Čes. slov. Farm. 48, 252 (1999); Opletalová, V.: Čes. slov. Farm. 49, 278 (2000); Opletalová, V. et al.: Folia Pharm. Univ. Carol. 25, 21 (2000)) and is devoted to the stabilizing action of chalcones on the vascular wall, vasodilating and anti-aggregating effects, and a favourable effect of their antioxidative activity on the functions of the cardiovascular system. The introduction also briefly discusses the nomenclature of this group of compounds.

        Key words: chalcones – 1,3-diarylpropen-1-ones – nomenclature – cardiovascular effects