Title : An experimental study on the antidepressant effect of gami-jigyultang
Abstract:
Depressive disorder results in enormous social loss like treatment cost, family burden and workplace inefficiency.
Depression is explained by various mechanisms, but among them, the lack of monoamine-based neurotransmitters such as serotonin and epinephrine is considered to be important mechanism.
Several antidepressants like TCAs, SSRIs, and MAOIs have been marketed and used but they have side effects such as nausea, vomiting, insomnia, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction.
Therefore, there is a growing need to develop a new therapeutic agent with fewer side effects.
In this study, we investigated the antidepressant effect of Gami-Jigyultang, the herbal extract known to treat depression in Korean medicine.
We used C57BL/6 mice and randomly divided into several groups according to the dose of induced drug. Except for normal, depression was induced by applying restraint stress like trapped in a narrow space during 2 weeks. The stressed mice were taken Gami-Jigyultang or Antidepressants or saline in oral administration 2 hours before the stress situation. After that, they were exposed to forced swimming test(FST) and open field test(OFT) and the serum corticosterone, BDNF mRNA, protein, and serotonin mRNA levels were measured and compared.
The mice taking Gami-Jigyultang showed more active behaviors in the FST than saline or amitriptyline induced mice.
In OFT, Gami-Jigyultang-fed mice showed a significant increase in the number of movements in contrast to amitriptyline and saline.
It can be concluded that Gami-Jigyultang inhibited the release of corticosterone without significant difference in the concentration, and through this, it had an antidepressant effect and was more effective than amitriptyline.
