Clelia Akiko Hiruma-Lima
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Biol Syst Open Access
The peptic ulcer disease (PUD) is a disease of modern times with relatively significant incidence on the developing country??s population. The increase in human life expectancy, excessive alcohol intake, the currently stress life style associated with prolonged therapy with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) has required the development of new drugs to treat this disease. The PUD is a complex and multi-factorial process including bacterial infections, the increase of acid secretion, generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), inhibition of the endogenous PGs and the degradation of the extracellular matrix. This disease has increasing mainly in elderly people because the intrinsic weak mucosal barrier induced by aging and also the more frequent use of NSAIDs. The treatment of PUD nowadays is related to some severe side effects thus, the searches for safer and more effective pharmacotherapy are required. The last decade has offered new insights in the preventative therapy and also the healing of PUD and monoterpenes from natural products could be the new perspective for treatment of this disease. In our project entitle ??Evaluation of monoterpenes in preventing and healing peptic ulcer disease? (FAPESP) our research group realized integrative studies with multidisciplinary approach. Based on these integrative studies, we evaluated the effects of monoterpenoids (geraniol, β-mycene and citral) and ensure the efficacy and safety as antiulcer drugs. The antiulcer studies of these monoterpenoids were investigated against different ulcerogenic agents including NSAID, HCL, pyloric ligature, absolute ethanol and ischemia??reperfusion procedure. We evaluated the gastroprotective effect of monoterpenoids by analyzing the gastric juice secretion, mucus, nitric oxide (NO), sulfhydryl compound, vanilloid receptor, glutathione (GSH) levels and myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity in the gastric and duodenal mucosa. We also evaluated the gastric and duodenal healing effects of monoterpenes and evaluated the effect of matrix metalloproteinase activity (MMP-2 and MMP-9) and roles of VEGF, PCNA and COX-2 in cell proliferation. The aim of this study is to gather and expose the numerous studies related to antiulcer activity of monoterpenoids, demonstrating their relevance to scientific research and presenting these natural compounds to the world population as future therapeutic ways.
