The Pharmacological and Pathological Studies on Taiwan Folk Medicine (VII): The Anti-inflammatory Effect of Echinops grjiisii

The hepatotoxic-protective effects of "San-fang-feng" (the root of E. grijisii) and "Lou-lu" (the root of E. latifolius) on CCl4 induced hepatotoxicity have been proposed in our previous paper (Lin et al, 1990). The anti-inflammatory effects of these two crude drugs were investigated in this experiment. The results indicated that both of them displayed pronounced anti-inflammatory activities against carrageenan-induced edema. Furthermore, in order to isolated the main active components of E. grijisii, fractions obtained from the methanolic extract of E. grijisii were investigated in mice for their 24-h LD50 and 95% confidence limits, which could be used as a guiding for further animal experiments. Our findings demonstrated that n-hexane (100,300 mg/kg), chloroform (30,100, 300 mg/kg) and ethyl acetate (30,100, 300 mg/kg) fractions could markedly inhibit the carrageenan-induced inflammation, and the main active principle was found to be concentrated in the chloroform fraction, which possessed significant inhibitory activities even more than does indomethacin.