Exploration Of Effective Components Of Dragon’s Blood On AD Transgenic Mice

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease, the clinical symptomsinclude memory loss, recognition dysfunction, decline of living ability anddysregulation of neurology and psychiatry. There are two pathological hallmarks: theneurofibrillary tangles composed of hyper-phosphonate tau and senile plaguescomposed of β-amyloid. Currently, Alzheimer’s disease is the most epidemicneurological disease worldwide leading to a considerable burden to the developmentof economy. The approved medicine can only mitigate the mild-to-moderate stage ofAD with marginal effects. Chinese herbal drugs are of multi-targets and low toxicity,and the unique properties make it an appropriate candidate. It has been demonstratedDragon’s blood can effectively neutralize inflammation, also has some benefits tonerve system. The project was designed to test the effects of Dragon’s blood extractand two of its constituents (pterostilbene and sitosterol) on AD model transgenicmice.We used APP (swe)/PS1(dE9) transgenic mice with oral administration of memantine,Dragon’s blood extract, pterostilbene and sitosterol.4-month old and6-month oldmice will be set two experimental groups, respectively. After administration, weconducted Morris water maze to detect cognitive ability. Then we performedimmunohistochemistry and western blotting to detect the alteration of APP and itsdownstream products, as well as the level and distribution of senile plagues. Theresults indicated that Dragon’s blood extract and pterostilbene significantly improvedthe recognitive ability in Morris water maze. However, neither caused a markedchange of the number of senile plagues or APP and its downstream products onmolecular level. Sitosterol did not bring marked alterations in all the experiments.