Comparison of analgesic activities of aconitine in different mice pain models

Abstract

Aconitine (AC) is the primary bioactive and secondary metabolite alkaloidin of Aconitum species which is accounted for more than 60% of the total diester-diterpenoid alkaloids in Aconite. To evaluate the analgesic effects of AC, 4 different pain models including hot plate assay, acetic acid writhing assay, formalin and CFA induced pain models were adopted in this study. In hot plate experiment, AC treatment at concentration of 0.3 mg/kg and 0.9 mg/kg improved the pain thresholds of mice similar to the positive drug aspirin at the concentration of 200 mg/kg (17.12% and 20.27% VS 19.21%). In acetic acid writhing experiment, AC significantly reduced the number of mice writhing events caused by acetic acid, and the inhibition rates were 68% and 76%. These results demonstrated that AC treatment revealed significant analgesic effects in both acute thermal stimulus pain model and chemically-induced visceral pain model. The biphasic nociceptive responses induced by formalin were significantly inhibited after AC treatment for 1h or 2h. The inhibition rates were 33.23% and 20.25% of AC treatment for 1h at 0.3 mg/kg and 0.9 mg/kg in phase I. In phase II, the inhibition rates of AC and aspirin were 36.08%, 32.48% and 48.82% respectively, which means AC showed similar analgesic effect to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory compounds. In the chronic CFA-induced nociception model, AC treatment also improved mice pain threshold to 131.33% at 0.3 mg/kg, which was similar to aspirin group (152.03%). Above all, our results verified that AC had obviously analgesic effects in different mice pain models.

JI017 Attenuates Oxaliplatin-Induced Cold Allodynia via Spinal TRPV1 and Astrocytes Inhibition in Mice

“…Accumulating evidence suggests that phytochemicals can affect the central nervous system by crossing the BBB. Thus, these phytochemicals may have played a role in the analgesic effect of JI017 as decursin has been reported to attenuate paclitaxel-induced pain and to act as an TRPV1 antagonist [65], while aconitine has also been shown to have an analgesic effect on various animal models of pain [66]. The analgesic effect of 6-gingerol was also reported in several studies [67][68][69].…”

Safety Assessment and Pain Relief Properties of Saffron from Taliouine Region (Morocco)

“…The animal reacts to the pain triggered by the chemical stimuli by licking its paw. Paw licking time was recorded for the first five minutes after the formalin injection as an indicator of acute pain and between the 15th and 30th min of injection, indicating chronic pain [ 56 ].…”

“…After 30 min of administration of the extracts, the animals were intraperitoneally injected with 0.6% of acetic acid. Then, the number of writhes produced in the mice within 15 min was counted for 20 min [ 56 ]. The analgesic effect was measured by calculating the reduction in the mean number of abdominal writhing for each group as compared to the control.…”

Advances on pharmacology and toxicology of aconitine

“…There is increasing evidence that AC has significant therapeutic effect on the nervous system, can significantly prolong the incubation period of writhing, and reduce the number of writhing in mice, effectively decreasing the pain sensation elicited by acetic acid [21,22]. In addition, some scholars used four different pain models including hot plate assay, acetic acid writhing assay, formalin, and CFA to evaluate the analgesic effect of AC, and the results also verified the obvious analgesic effects of AC [23]. Kang et al further found that iontophoresis of AC can reduce the local 5‐HT content in inflammatory tissue of the adjuvant arthritis rats and increase the content of 5‐HT, norepinephrine (NE), and hypothalamus β‐EP and produce analgesic effect [24].…”