Therapeutic Potential of Pien Tze Huang on Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis Rat.

Xuemei Qiu,Aiping Lu,Danping Fan,Ge Zhang,Cheng Lu,Jiawen Shen,Qingqing Guo,Xiaojuan He,Xue Liu,Kang Zheng,Hui Luo

doi:10.1155/2018/2952471

Abstract

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). There is still lack of commercially viable treatment currently. Pien Tze Huang (PZH), a traditional Chinese medicine, has been proved to have anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, and immunoregulatory effects. This study investigated the possible therapeutic effects of PZH on experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) rats, a classic animal model of MS. Male Lewis rats were immunized with myelin basic protein (MBP) peptide to establish an EAE model and then treated with three doses of PZH. Clinical symptoms, organ coefficient, histopathological features, levels of proinflammatory cytokines, and chemokines as well as MBP and Olig2 were analyzed. The results indicated that PZH ameliorated the clinical severity of EAE rats. It also remarkably reduced inflammatory cell infiltration in the CNS of EAE rats. Furthermore, the levels of IL-17A, IL-23, CCL3, and CCL5 in serum and the CNS were significantly decreased; the p-P65 and p-STAT3 levels were also downregulated in the CNS, while MBP and Olig2 in the CNS of EAE rats had a distinct improvement after PZH treatment. In addition, PZH has no obvious toxicity at the concentration of 0.486 g/kg/d. This study demonstrated that PZH could be used to treat MS.

Highlights

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most frequent chronic inflammatory autoimmune neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system (CNS) with the hallmarks of focal demyelination and inflammatory cell infiltration in the brain and the spinal cord [1]
Pien Tze Huang (PZH) slightly increased body weight compared with the model group, there was no significant difference between the PZH group and the model group (Figure 1(b))
PZH exerted a similar effect to prednisone acetate (PA) in terms of ameliorating clinical symptoms and increasing body weight, and there was no significant difference between the two groups

Summary

Introduction

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most frequent chronic inflammatory autoimmune neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system (CNS) with the hallmarks of focal demyelination and inflammatory cell infiltration in the brain and the spinal cord [1]. It is a debilitating disease with high disability and recurrence rates, endangering over one million people worldwide [2]. Some chemokines play important roles in inflammatory process by mediating immune cells trafficking across the blood-brain barrier and modulating their transfer to lesion sites [9]

Methods

Results

Conclusion