The Preventive And Therapeutic Effect Of Extracts From Ampelopsis Grossedentata On Diet-Induced Obese Mice

Obesity is a chronic metabolic disease. Genetic and environmental factors both contribute to the development of obesity that may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, hyperlipemia, type2diabetes, strokes and cancer. The incidence of obesity is increasing rapidly in recent years, which has become a global healthy problem and focus the attention of scientists on the treatment of obesity. There are several medicines such as appetite or lipase inhibitors being used in clinic treatment, but these medicines work only by inhibiting lipid or energy intake and have no direct effects on regulating the lipid metabolism. In addition, some of them have been reported to have side-effects and resistance for long-term usage. Thus, substances with anti-obesity activities has been payed increasing attention.Recent years, natural-source factors with the anti-obesity activity, such as antioxidation and hypolipidemia activities, were found prevalently in many kinds of plants. Peroxisome proliferators-activated receptors (PPARs) are a family of genes closely related to obesity. Therefore, using HepG2cell line, the present study screened extracts from33kinds of plants by detecting their effects on PPARs expression to justify whether these extracts have the anti-obesity activities. As a result, we found that the extract from Ampelopsis grossedentata showed a higher activity on PPARs.According to the screening results in vitro, we next evaluated the anti-obesity activity of this extract by using an in vivo system. C57BL/6J mice were adopted for establishing a high-fat-high-sucrose diet-induced obese model in the present research. Results showed that the application of this extract could reduce not only body-weight gain and fat accumulation but also the concentrations of serum TG, TC and FFA in a dose-dependent manner in both the obese and obese-developing mice.In order to study the mechanism of the anti-obesity activity of Ampelopsis grossedentata extract, the expression of genes related to the obesity had been analyzed in liver, adipose and muscle of both obese mice and obese-developing mice by qRT-PCR. We found that the expression of UCP2and PPARδ in all three tissues, HSL in adipose tissue, and AdipoRl in muscle tissue were up-regulated significantly while the expression of PPARy in all three tissues, Leptin, FAS and aP2in adipose tissue were down-regulated significantly by the treatment of Ampelopsis grossedentata extract. The results obtained in the present study indicated that lipid catabolism could be accelerated, and fat export and synthesis might be restrained by the extract treatment. As a result, adipocyte differentiation and lipid accumulation could be decreased, and insulin and leptin sensitivity may be improved.In conclusion, it has been found from the present study that the extract from Ampelopsis grossedentata has remarkable preventive and therapeutic effects on obesity. And the present study lays the foundation for further research on the anti-obesity effects of extracts from Ampelopsis grossedentata or other plants, and also for exploituring Ampelopsis grossedentata as anti-obesity products.