Antinociceptive effects of saussurea lappa roots ethanol extract in experimental animals

Abstract

The current study was designed to investigate both central and peripheral analgesic activities of crude extract of roots of Saussurea lappa (S. lappa) plant at 100% ethanol concentration. These activities were processed and evaluated through Eddy's hot plate and acetic acid induced-writhing methods, respectively, on laboratory Swiss albino mice. Reference positive control used was paracetamol, and negative control was distilled water, and statistical analysis done by SPSS version 25 to test one-way ANOVA for group mean differences, followed by Tukey and Dunnett two-sided post-hoc tests. Before the mentioned assessment, an acute oral toxicity test by a fixed-dose procedure method (FDP) was taken to check the safety of the plant. This plant was safe under experimentation, and it exerted significant (P < 0.01) analgesic effects at a dose of 500mg/kg. The crude extract revealed a noticeable increase of latency time to thermal pain stimuli when compared to paracetamol positive control at 100mg/kg concentration by 36.42%, and it reduced the number of writhing contractions by 21.73% when compared even to the positive control. It is presumed that S. lappa contains particular phytoconstituents that are responsible for presenting these effects. In both applied tests, S. lappa proved that it could be used as a safe, powerful analgesic treatment.