Olatunbosun LO
Radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy are common therapeutic modalities for cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma. These therapeutic modalities often results in haemopoietic and immune dyscrasia as haemopoietic stem cells are damaged during the procedure, and subsequently, committed haemopoietic and immune cells are depleted. How rapidly patients recover from radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy greatly depends on the percentage of resting stem cells remaining after such treatment. Experimental investigations of haemopoiesis and clinical approaches to correcting its deficiencies have focused on cytokine activity. However, such treatments are costly, and are not without certain risks (Sanberg at al., 2006). As a means to protect stem cells or help damaged stem cells to recover, the use of biological response modifiers (BRMs) has received attention. After decades of work on radiation countermeasures (Velpula N et al., 2013), no pharmaceuticals are currently approved for acute radiation syndrome (ARS). There remains a need to develop safe and effective radioprotectors to prevent or ameliorate radiation injury with radioprotectants or radiation mitigators, or by stimulating regeneration of tissue with post-radiation treatment. Although there has been an upsurge of interest on the effects of various dietary insufficiencies on haemopoietic and immune responses in recent years, few research studies have investigated the proliferative effect of plant extracts which may modulate proliferation and differentiation of haemopoietic stem cells. This study was done to determine the potential proliferative effect of Telfaria occidentalis on haemopoietic multipotent stem cells in irradiated guinea pigs bone marrow.Bone marrow cells from irradiated guinea pigs were harvested and treated with varying concentrations of the extracts of the Telfaria occidentalis and the degree of proliferation of the cultured guinea-pig bone marrow haemopoietic stem cells determined.The extract shows significant statistical difference in proliferation at p-value of 0.001 when compared with the control using t-test. There was also strong positive correlation between concentration of the extracts of the Telfaria occidentalis and the degree of proliferation of the cultured guinea-pig bone marrow haemopoietic stem cell harvested at ‘r’ value of 0.812 and p-value of 0.001.The study shows that the plant has positive proliferative effects on haemopoietic multipotent stem cells. The proliferative effect correlates with the concentration of the plant extract (Telfaria occidentalis).
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