Investigation into the protective effects of Hypericum Triquetrifolium Turra seed against cyclophosphamide-induced testicular injury in Sprague Dawley rats

Abstract

For centuries, Turkey has been a significant location here around 80 species of Hypericum with differing names widely occur, which is also known as Turkish folk medicine in treating some bacterial diseases as well as stomach and intestine inflammation. Recent studies have reported this herb family to contain numbers of bioactive compound contents. The study aims to investigate the protective effects of Hypericum triquetrifolium Turra (HT) upon oxidative stress and apoptosis in a rat model in which testes injury was induced by CP. The testicular injury was caused using CP (150 mg/kg). The rats were treated with a single dose (100 mg/kg) of methanol extract of HT to investigate various biochemical markers in the serum and plasma of blood samples apart from assessing the prognosis of CP-induced testicular damage. Added to that, histological analyses were performed to identify possible structural changes and apoptotic indicators, like Bax, Caspase-3, and Bcl-2. In CP Group, there was a rise in the levels of total oxidant status (TOS), malondialdehyde (MDA), oxidative stress index (OSI), Caspase-3, and Bax while superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), glutathione (GSH), Bcl-2, and total antioxidant capacity (TAC) all decreased. Also, our histological analysis showed damaged testes. On the other hand, neither biochemical nor histological analysis showed testicular damage in HT Alone Group. In CP + HT Group, a significant number of the negatives changes due to CP were observed to have improved remarkably following an HT treatment. This study results suggest that HT could help improve CP-induced testicular injury thanks to its anti-oxidative and anti-apoptotic properties.

Graphical Abstract

Highlights

• The present study is the first of its kind in the sense that it investigated the effects of Hypericum triquetrifolium Turra (HT) on the testicular injury that is attributable to cyclophosphamide (CP), which is a drug used for chemotherapy.

• Confocal and light microscopic analyses revealed that HT reduced CP-related oxidative stress, apoptosis, and tissue damage in statistically significant amounts.

• The antioxidant properties of HT appear to account for the protective effects of HT upon experimentally induced tissue damage.

Keywords:

• Cyclophosphamide
• testicular toxicity
• Hypericum triquetrifolium
• Turra
• anti-oxidant
• anti-apoptotic

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this paper.

Author contributions

The experiment was designed by SC, SCY, CK and AA. GA, CK and AA carried out the experimental studies. SAB, VŞ, MC and GA analyses the data. MC wrote the manuscript. All the authors were involved in revising and confirming the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The present study gained approval from Local Animal Experiment Ethics Committee at Eskişehir Osmangazi University [numbered 444–1/2015] and was supported by Scientific Research Projects Coordination Department at Mardin Artuklu University [MAU-BAP-15-SHMYO-23].