NEUROPROTECTION OF ETHANOLIC EXTRACT OF WITHANIA SOMNIFERA AND WITHANOLIDE A IN MOTOR CO-ORDINATION ON EXPERIMENTAL HUNTINGTON’S RAT MODEL

Neurodegeneration is a powerful initiator for a number of nervous system related diseases that come under the term “neurodegenerative diseases”. Neurodegenerative diseases are incurable, results in the progressive degeneration of nerve cells and causes problems with movement and mental functioning that became a challenge in present day’s health care. For this study we made a model of Huntington’s chorea, one of the neurodegenerative disorders by inducing experimental neurodegeneration and tried to prevent the neurodegeneration by giving ethanolic extract of Withania somnifera and its active principle withanolide A 10 days before the lesion surgery. The herb Withania somnifera is a well known herb in India and was used by all the Ayurvedic legends for nervous system related problems. We used 5 animal groups for this study they are CO, SC, LC, WS125 and WA100. All the animals were trained to walk in a narrow beam prior to surgery and were analyzed for motor co-ordination on the 5^th day post lesion to find out the protective nature of the drugs employed. The results were amazing. The behaviour of the drug group animals were more equivalent with the control animals unlike the LC animals, performed with lots of errors on beam walking. These results clearly indicates that the drugs were very good in protecting the nerve cells from experimental degeneration and so can do the same action in real life.