Praveen Kumar Kodumuri; Anil Kumar Pandey & Christofer Thomas

Herbal extracts used for treatment of diabetes has focused mostly on the hypoglycaemic and anti-oxidant property.There are no studies which focused on its effect on dendritic architecture of pyramidal neurons of hippocampus caused by diabetes. This study was taken up to explore the effect of administration of Trigonella foenum-graecum (fenugreek) seed extract on diabetes induced dendritic atrophy in hippocampus. Experimental diabetes was induced in rats by administering single dose of Streptozotocin (60 mg/kg)intraperitoneally.Treatment groups of rats were orally administeredfenugreek seed extract of 1 g/kg body weight for 6 weeks. Followingly they were sacrificed and the brains were removed, processed for the Golgi-Cox stain method.The number of dendritic branching points and intersections were counted in successive radial segments of 20 μm up to a radial distance of 100 micron from soma and analysed by the Sholl’s method. The rats with diabetes showed a significant decrease in the dendritic length and branching points in most of the apical and basal dendrites of CA1 and CA3 pyramidal neurons.Treatment with fenugreek seed extract were able to significantly alleviate the dendritic atrophy in most of the segments except in the apical branching points of the CA1 neuron. The present study demonstrates that fenugreek seed extract having a proven hypoglycaemic and anti-diabetic property also possess protection to the hippocampal pyramidal neurons form diabetes associated neuronal atrophy.

KEY WORDS: Diabetes; Dendritic atrophy; Fenugreek; Hippocampus.

KODUMURI, P. K.; PANDEY, A. K. & THOMAS, C. Fenugreek seed extract alleviates hippocampal dendritic atrophy in streptozotocin induced diabetic rats. Int. J. Morphol., 38(6):1693-1699, 2020.