Effect of oriental herbal prescription Guan‐Xin‐Er‐Hao on coronary flow in healthy volunteers and antiapoptosis on myocardial ischemia‐reperfusion in rat models

Abstract

Ischemic heart disease (IHD) is the main cause of death and a major public health problem in the world. The traditional herbal medicinal formula Guan-Xin-Er-Hao (GXEH) has been used in China and East Asia for the treatment of coronary heart disease, however, the underlying cardioprotection mechanisms remain unclear. To make clear the antiischemic mechanism involved, GXEH was orally administered to 15 healthy volunteers. Heart rates (HR), blood pressure and coronary flow (CF) velocity before and 1 h after a single oral dose of GXEH were observed and compared. It was demonstrated that the oral administration of GXEH increased CF acutely in a dose-dependent manner without modification of systemic hemodynamic parameters. Moreover, the myocardial protection function of GXEH was also experimentally examined in ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) rat models. Apoptosis was measured quantitatively by the terminal transferase UTP nick end-labeling (TUNEL) method and confirmed by caspase-3 activity. The infarct size and TUNEL-positive cells of GXEH-treated group (20 g/kg) were reduced significantly, which was consistent with the decreased caspase-3 activity. These suggest that GXEH protects hearts from ischemia injury by increasing CF and reduces infarct size by inhibiting myocardial apoptosis.

Anti-Inflammatory Effect of Guan-Xin-Er-Hao via the Nuclear Factor-Kappa B Signaling Pathway in Rats with Acute Myocardial Infarction

“…It has been demonstrated that some TCMs have anti-inflammatory effects in CVD treatment [18,29,35]. In our previous studies, GXEH reduced infarct size by mediating lots of endogenous materials via multiple pathways to act on myocardial cells during acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in rats [12,24,36,37]. Accordingly, we speculated that GXEH might have an anti-inflammatory effect and that the anti-inflammatory effect might be one of the cardioprotective mechanisms.…”

“…Formula extracts were prepared as previously described [36,37]. All of the herbs were purchased from West China Hospital (Chengdu, China).…”

“…According to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPlC) [24,37], the contents of each component in the crude herb (mg/g, n=3) were: tanshinol 0.704 ± 0.007, protocatechualdehyde 0.015 ± 0.0005, peoniflorin 3.715 ± 0.131, hydroxysafflor yellow A 2.067 ± 0.017, and ferulic acid 0.129 ± 0.001. The chromatogram of GXEH is shown in Fig.…”

“…The rat dose of GXEH in the present study was converted according to our previous study. The high dose used in rats was 15 g/kg, which is equivalent to a 2.5 g/ kg dose administered to healthy humans [37] and clinical patients [30] without causing significant side effects. The dosage in the rat was 6.7 times the dose given to humans, which is consistent with the findings of others [12,23].…”

“…Recently, it has been demonstrated that GXEH protects the heart from ischemic injury by inhibiting myocardial apoptosis [7,8,12,28,36,37], increasing coronary flow velocity [34,37] and suppressing oxidative stress [24]. However, to the best of our knowledge, no research has reported on the antiinflammatory effect of GXEH during the acute phase of myocardial infarction.…”