Study On Developmental Toxicity Of Aconitum To Rat Embryos In Vivo And In Vitro

Aconitum napellus, a kind of Traditional Chinese Medicine widely used in clinic, has many pharmacology effects such as enhancing heart, heightening blood pressure, easing pain and anti-inflammation. At the same time it is also very toxic. The main toxins are aconitine, mesaconitine, jesaconitine. The main target organs are the cardiovascular and central nervous systems. Considering whether it is safe to pregnant woman, whether it has developmental toxicity to embryos, we looked up domestic and foreign literatures and found no related data about it. So we chose three representative aconitum: Saline lateral root of aconite (SLRA), Crude Sichuan aconite root (CSAR), Crude kusnezoff monkshood (CKM), and adopted rat teratogenicity test and whole embryo culture model to observe their effect on the growth and development of embryos.In the rat teratogenicity test, the SD rats were divided into 7 groups: SLRA (1.14, 3.43, 10.30g raw drug/kg) , 13.0g raw drug/kg CSAR, 8.3g raw drug/kg CKM, negative control with distilled water and positive control with vitamin A. The rats of experimental groups and negative control group were administrated for 10 days from 7th～16th day after pregnancy, that of positive control group were done for 4 days from 9th～12th day after pregnancy. The results showed that malformation of external, internal organ and bone weren't found in fetuses treated with three drugs. But the body weight growth and food consumption were reduced in the pregnant rats at the high dose of three drugs, while the body length and the breastbone calcification of fetuses decreased at the 8.3 g raw drug/kg CKM.In the rat post-implantation whole embryo culture test, the day 10.5 SD rat embryos at organogenetic stage were co-cultured for 48 hours in immediately...