Haematological evaluation and antiplasmodial activity of fractions and ethanolic extract of Gongronema latifolium in Plasmodium berghei infected albino mice

Gongronema latifolium (GL) is used by folkloric medicine practitioners especially in Africa, most specifically in Nigeria as multipurpose medicinal plant abundant medicinal potential with ameliorative, curative and preventive effect in diseases control and therapy. The plant, especially the leaves have been proven to possess medicinal effect on experimental animals. This study is set to investigate the antiplasmodial activity; suppressive, prophylactic and curative effects of GL leaves extract and fractions namely n-HEX (n-hexane fraction), ETOAC (Ethyl acetate fraction), AQF (Aqueous fraction), ACET (Acetone fraction), ETOH (Ethanol extract) on haematological parameters of P. berghei infected mice. Mice (157) were grouped into 3 assemblages for prophylactic, suppressive and curative antiplasmodial study. They were divided into 7 groups for prophylactic and suppressive treatments and 8 groups for the curative treatment. The groups were named as follows: MC (Malaria control), ACT (Positive control), NC (Normal control) and fractions namely ETOH (Ethanol fraction) n-HEX (n-Hexane fraction), Acetone fraction (ACET) ethyl acetate fraction (ETOAC), and Aqueous fraction (AQF). All the treatment batches obtained 500 mg/kg body weight (bw) of the respective extract or fractions. MC got coartem (1O mg/kg/day bw) and NC for curative treatment orally administered distilled HO (10 ml/kg bw). Treatment with GL in their different vehicles started after the parasites were induced, which involved another 4 days. This is the curative model. The suppressive aspect involved the administration of the different vehicles of the GL thirty minutes after which the induction had taken place. This process went on for four days. The various GL vehicle forms were given to the mice for consecutively three days before induction of the malarial parasites; thus, this constituted the prophylactic method. Later, Mean Survival Time, i.e MST and density of blood parasite were determined for prophylactic, curative and suppressive groups. The curative group animals got considered for haematological analysis. The result shows that ethanol extract and fractions significantly reduced the parasitaemia level in all the three models. The degree of anti-plasmodial activity was highest in prophylactic group while ACET group showed the highest chemo-suppressive potency of 93.48 % among the other treatment groups. In the suppressive model, the ethyl acetate fraction exerted the highest chemo-suppressive effect of 80.09 %. The findings further reveal that haematological indices were altered by the high parasitaemia level which also significantly (P<0.05) reduced, compared to MC. Active ingredients in the ethyl acetate fraction proved to be most effective in boosting erythropoietic status of the experimental mice.