Antioxidant activity of rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis L.) essential oil and its hepatoprotective potential

BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Research Article

Tatjana Ćebović¹  Saša Vukmirović²  Aleksandar Rašković²  Nebojša Pavlović²  Momir Mikov²  Isidora Milanović³ 

[1] Clinical Center of Vojvodina, Faculty of Medicine, University of Novi Sad, Hajduk Veljkova 3, 21000, Novi Sad, Serbia;Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Clinical Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Novi Sad, Hajduk Veljkova 3, 21000, Novi Sad, Serbia;High Medical School of Professional Skills, Cara Dušana 254, 11080, Zemun, Serbia;

关键词: Rosmarinus officinalis;    Rosemary;    Essential oil;    Antioxidant enzymes;    Hepatoprotection;    Oxidative stress;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6882-14-225

 received in 2013-12-05, accepted in 2014-06-19,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundNatural antioxidant products are increasingly being used to treat various pathological liver conditions considering the role of oxidative stress in their pathogenesis. Rosemary essential oil has already being used as a preservative in food industry due to its antioxidant and antimicrobial activities, but it was shown to possess additional health benefits. The aim of our study was to evaluate the protective effect of rosemary essential oil on carbon tetrachloride - induced liver injury in rats and to explore whether its mechanism of action is associated with modulation of hepatic oxidative status.MethodsChemical composition of isolated rosemary essential oil was determined by gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. Antioxidant activity was determined in vitro using DPPH assay. Activities of enzyme markers of hepatocellular damage in serum and antioxidant enzymes in the liver homogenates were measured using the kinetic spectrophotometric methods.ResultsIn this research, we identified 29 chemical compounds of the studied rosemary essential oil, and the main constituents were 1,8-cineole (43.77%), camphor (12.53%), and α-pinene (11.51%). Investigated essential oil was found to exert hepatoprotective effects in the doses of 5 mg/kg and 10 mg/kg by diminishing AST and ALT activities up to 2-fold in serum of rats with carbon tetrachloride - induced acute liver damage. Rosemary essential oil prevented carbon tetrachloride - induced increase of lipid peroxidation in liver homogenates. Furthermore, pre-treatment with studied essential oil during 7 days significantly reversed the activities of antioxidant enzymes catalase, peroxidase, glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase in liver homogenates, especially in the dose of 10 mg/kg.ConclusionsOur results demonstrate that rosemary essential oil, beside exhibiting free radical scavenging activity determined by DPPH assay, mediates its hepatoprotective effects also through activation of physiological defense mechanisms.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Rašković et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.