Effects Of Puerarin On Changed Indexes Of Blood Gas Analysis And Relative Pathophysiology In Hypercholesterolemic Rabbits

Hypercholesterolemia (HC) is one of dominant risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. Vascular endothelial dysfunction (VEDF) induced by HC in the early stage plays an important role in occurrence and development in many diseases. It is also one of critical pathophysiologic changes of atherosclerosis (AS). The exact mechanisms underlying the VEDF and the microcirculation abnormalities in HC especially in early stage are not well understood although many researches have been done on pathophysiology of HC and AS. As HC and AS are both systemic diseases, to investigate the changes and the effects of HC on the microcirculation is much more significant of pathophysiology. However, reports remain few on the field due to a short history of the study and the limited experimental methods. The effective medical treatments to HC are dissatisfactory except to the drugs of modulating blood lipids and anti-atheriosclerosis such as statins. It is more significant that further clarifies the mechanism and the damage of VEDF induced by HC and that finds new medical methods for HC.The purpose of this study was to investigate the damaging effect and mechanism of microvascular and microcirculation during the early HC and to observe the protective effect of puerarin (Pu) in rabbits. Blood gas analysis and experimental methods of biochemistry and molecular biology were used. The male New Zealand rabbits were randomly divided into three groups: normal control (NC) group, HC group (fed with high cholesterol feed) and hypercholesterolemia plus Pu (HP) group (fed with high cholesterol feed plus 0.2 g/kg Pu per day). At the end of three week experiment period, level of total serum cholesterol (TC), renal capillary permeability, saturation of oxygen (SO₂) of arterial blood and venous blood before and after i.v. acetylcholine(ACh)(four blood examples), artery blood pressure, thoracic aortic ring ACh-induced...