English abstract
Background: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic inflammatory disorder that affects the gastrointestinal tract. It includes both Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). UC lesions mainly involve the mucosal layer, but in the advanced stage it may also involve the submucosa layers. The aims of this work were to study the effect of Gum Arabic (GA) on disease activity in an UC model and to measure the effect of Gum Arabic on inflammatory markers during the disease progression of UC.
Methods: Seventy mice were divided into three groups and treated for twenty six days as follows: control, post GA and pre GA. The weights of the 70 mice were monitored for five days. Then colitis was induced in mice from day five to day ten. All mice were kept for recovery until day 26. The severity of colitis and the recovery were assessed by various parameters, macroscopic and microscopic. Body weight, presence of blood in feces, feces consistency and disease activity were the macroscopic parameters, while microscopic parameters were fibrosis, histology scoring and inflammatory markers.
Results: It was found that the group given GA before induction of colitis had less body weight reduction, less disease activity index and less histology scoring. In addition, they had less fibrotic markers indicating a major role of GA in regulation of fibroblast
function.
Conclusion, GA has better preventive effect rather than therapeutic effect on mouse model of UC.
