In-vivo study on the anticonvulsant activity of the endophytic fungi extract from local plant / Siti Norhayati Sapili

Epilepsy is a chronic and progressive brain disorder which is characterized by occurrence of periodic and unpredictable seizures attack which may be originating from both or only partial hemisphere of the brain. It can affect anyone regardless to age, social, racial, sex or geographical border. As in developing countries where modem drug therapy is hard to be obtained, most of the people still rely on traditional healer for any ailments they faced and even in some countries traditional healers are the person given the authority to treat epilepsy. There are a large variety of synthetic antiepileptic drugs available but since most of the therapy require prolong duration of treatment and the common practice of polypharmacy in prescribing antiepileptic drugs which increases the possibility of toxicity development, there are called to run a research on developing a better and safer medicines from potential medicinal plant. The fungi extract used in this study was isolated from local medicinal plant and recent study revealed its cytotoxicity properties against cancer cells. Upon exposure to acute doses of this fungi extract, the onset of seizure attack, peak time and death time of the mice which injected with picrotoxin were delayed. The picrotoxin was used to induce the convulsion attack and administered intraperitoneally.