Chemical Constituents And Anti-inflammatory Activity Of Veronicastrum Axillare (Sieb. Et Zucc.)

Inflammation, both as a defense reaction and a pathological response of the body, often bring severe pathological damage to body tissues or organs. Therefore, the control of the inflammatory process is the indispensable means in the course of treatment of many diseases. Chinese medicine has a medication history of thousands of years. Many traditional uses showed that a lot of Chinese medicine displayed good therapeutic effects and adaptability in the treatment of many complex diseases. However, the application of traditional Chinese medicine was too traditional and there are no unified standards, which lead to be wrongly acknowledged and lack of entirely application of Chinese medicine. As a genus of Scrophulariaceae family, the Veronicastrum genus comprises nearly twenty species in all, which are all perennial herbs and mainly distributed in eastern Asia and North America, and a total of14species have been spreaded in China. Veronicastrum axillare (Sieb. et Zucc.) is a major source of Chinese medicine ascites grass, bitter in taste, slightly cold in nature, and attributive to liver, spleen, kidney channels. It has the main effects of relieving edema by inducing diuresis, and resolving macula and detoxicating, attending ascites due to cirrhosis, nephritis edema, bruises, sores boils poisoning, burns, snake bites. It was used for the treatment of ascites, especially ascites caused by Schistosomiasis japonica. However, there have been a few reports on chemical constituents and pharmacological activities of Veronicastrum axillare. Therefore, we studied the chemical compositions and anti-inflammatory activity of its each fraction as well as its main chemical compositions of Veronicastrum axillare in accordance with its effects of relieving edema, and resolving macula and detoxicating, which could provide the basis for the further research and the establishment of quality standards of Veronicastrum axillare. The main contents of our study are following two aspects below:1. Chemical constituents of Veronicastrum axillareThe80%ethanol extract of V. axillare (8.5kg) was partitioned with petroleum ether (PE), CH2Cl2, EtOAc and n-BuOH. successively. A total of seven new and twenty-eight known compounds were isolated from CH2Cl2, EtOAc and n-BuOH fractions and their structures were elucidated by detailed spectroscopic analyses on the basis of UV, IR, MS,1H-NMR, 13C-NMR and2D-NMR data. The principal component (procumboside A) was isolated from the ethyl acetate extract. The major types of the isolated compounds were phenylpropanoid glycosides, phenylpropanoids, flavones, monoterpenes, fatty acids, steroids and small molecular phenolic acids compounds.2. Anti-inflammatory activity of Veronicastrum axillareWe studied the anti-inflammatory activity of total extract, petroleum ether-soluble extract, CH2Cl2-soluble extract, EtOAc-soluble extract, n-butanol-soluble extract of Veronicastrum axillare and procumboside A. The ethyl acetate extract and procumboside A, which significantly inhibited ear edema induced by xylene in mice, showed anti-inflammatory activity superior to the positive drug (dexamethasone acetate) in vivo.