Leonurine protects ischemia-induced brain injury via modulating SOD, MDA and GABA levels

Abstract

The present study was designed to investigate the protective effects of leonurine, a compound purified from Herba Leonuri that is active on ischemic rat behavior and cortical neurons, and explore the underlying mechanism. The general rat activity, cortical neuron morphology, superoxide dismutase (SOD), malondialdehyde (MDA), g-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate decarboxylase 67 (GAD67) levels were measured. We found leonurine significantly improve the general activity of rats in an open-field test, which was associated with attenuated neuronal damage induced by ischemia. Moreover, serum SOD activity was significantly greater, MDA level lower in the leonurine group as compared with ischemia group. In addition, GABA content in the cerebral cortex was significantly greater in high-dose leonurine group. Correspondingly, GAD67 protein level coincided with the GABA level. Taken together, our results demonstrated that leonurine attenuated brain injury during ischemia via antioxidative and anti-excitotoxicity effects by targeting GABA and leonurine might become a useful adjuvant neuroprotective agent.

Keywords

cerebral ischemia / GABA / neuroprotection / leonurine / SOD

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31772686 and 31502025) and the Public Service Sectors Agriculture Research Projects of Ministry of Agriculture of China (201403051-07).Compliance with ethics guidelinesƒShilei Zheng, Jingru Zhu, Jiao Li, Shuang Zhang, and Yunfei Ma declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.ƒAll institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)