ABSTRACT
AIM:To investigate the effects of grape polyphenol ( GP) on caerulein-induced acute pancreatitis (AP) in mice.METHODS:Two-month-old female mice of ICR strains (n=21) were randomly divided into 3 groups:normal control ( NC) group, AP group, and GP-treated AP group.Before AP induction, the mice in GP-treated AP group were continuously administrated with 1.5 g/kg GP aqueous solution by gavage for 7 d, while those in NC group and AP group were treated with saline as a vehicle control.On the 7th day, the mice in AP group and GP-treated AP group were in-traperitoneally injected with caerulein (50μg/kg) in 1 h interval for 7 serial injections in total.The mice in NC group were treated with saline according to the same procedure in experimental group.All the mice were sacrificed 24 h after AP induc-tion, and the pancreatic tissues and lung tissues were harvested for further investigation of the pathological changes, macro-phages infiltration, myeloperoxidase ( MPO ) activity and expression of inflammatory and oxidative stress factors.RE-SULTS:Compared with AP group, the mice in GP-treated AP group showed milder morphological changes and lower path-ological scores, including the scores of edema, inflammation and vacuolization (P<0.05), but the necrosis scores and to-tal scores showed no statistical difference between these 2 groups.Besides, the mice in GP-treated AP group had fewer macrophage infiltration, lower lung MPO activity (P<0.01), and lower expression of inflammatory factors, tumor necrosis factor α(TNF-α)and monocyte chemotactic protein 1 (MCP-1) (P<0.05), and oxidative stress factors, superoxide dis-mutase (SOD)-1, SOD-2 and NADPH oxidase 2 (NOX-2) (P<0.01).CONCLUSION:Grape polyphenol has remark-able protective effect on pancreatic tissues of mice with caerulein-induced acute pancreatitis, and the mechanisms may be related to down-regulation of inflammatory and oxidative stress factors.