Research sectionThe in vitro antimutagenic activity of Triphala — an Indian herbal drug
Introduction
According to Doll and Peto (1981), dietary factors contribute to one-third of annual cancer related deaths in United States. While the traditional Western diet is believed to cause an increased lifetime risk of cancer, the diets high in plant-derived foods offer a protective effect (Balentine et al., 1999, Eastwood, 1999, Lee, 1999). Accordingly, as a part of an overall strategy geared towards the defeat of cancer, it is now apparent that the identification and characterization of dietary phytochemicals can play an integral role. The use of medicinal plants or their active principles in modern medicine for the prevention and/or treatment of chronic diseases suffers from a lack of scientific evidence, and only very few medicinal plants have attracted the interest of scientists. Recent research in this area has highlighted the significance of secondary plant metabolites which are antimutagenic/anticarcinogenic and are the important constituents of many medicinal plants. Many botanists and biologists mapped out specific compounds, for example polyphenols, triterpenoids and many other secondary metabolites, that have anticancer/antimutagenic properties (Amonkar et al., 1989, Huang et al., 1992, Nagabhushan et al., 1992, Siglin et al., 1995, Oetari et al., 1996, Wang et al., 1996, Hollman and Katan, 1999, Kuroda and Hara, 1999, Shih et al., 2000). Triphala, which is a combination of three plants, namely Terminalia chebula, T. bellerica and Emblica officinalis, has been used extensively as a drug against a number of diseases (Awasthi and Nath, 1968, Ram Chandra Reddy et al., 1990). In the present study, we report the antimutagenic effect of the polyphenolic fractions isolated from Triphala.
Section snippets
Preparation of extracts
The finely powdered Triphala was procured from Dabur India Ltd (Daburgram, Bihar, India). It is a mixture of Terminalia bellerica, T. chebula and Emblica officinalis in equal proportions. A weighed amount of the drug was extracted with water in a flask at room temperature. The flask was kept on a shaker for 6–7 h. The water was then distilled off to obtain a water extract. The residue left after water extraction was dried and then extracted with acetone. Acetone was distilled off to obtain an
Results and discussion
The impact of acetone and chloroform extracts on the histidine revertants induced by direct and S9 dependent mutagens is presented in Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5. Water extract did not show significant inhibition of the revertants (data not shown). It was noticed that acetone and chloroform extracts exerted significant inhibition against tester strains TA98 and TA100 of S. typhimurium. Among the two extracts, acetone extract showed maximum inhibition of
Conclusions
This study supports the contention that traditional medicines remain a valuable resource in the potential discovery of natural product pharmaceuticals. A remarkable antimutagenic activity exhibited by ‘Triphala’ provides a scientific validation for the popular use of this drug and helped us in further work on isolation and identification of active compounds.
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2021, South African Journal of BotanyCitation Excerpt :In this study, An Ames histidine reversal assay was conducted with TA98 and TA100 tester strains of Salmonella typhimurium against the direct-acting mutagens, 4-nitro-o-phenylenediamine (NPD), sodium azide and the indirect-acting pro-mutagen, 2-aminofluorene (2AF) in the presence of phenobarbitone-induced rat hepatic S9. Results revealed anti-mutagenic tendencies of acetone and chloroform extracts of Triphala for all direct and S9 dependent mutagens used (Kaur et al., 2002). In a similar fashion, agar dilution and disc diffusion methods were used to study the antimicrobial activity of P. emblica.