Avaliação da atividade citotóxica e antitumoral in vitro e in vivo de extratos da urtica dioica l.: uma revisão

Abstract

Urtica dioica is an edible perennial plant widely used since ancient times in traditional medicine for the treatment of various diseases, such as diabetes, rheumatism, as an adjuvant in the treatment of prostatic hyperplasia, in the prevention of diseases of the cardiovascular system, as an antimicrobial, among others. In this study, the objective was to carry out a review of the information available in the scientific literature on extracts obtained from plant parts of U. dioica with anticancer and cytotoxic activity, as well as to elucidate the antioxidant action of the extracts on tumor cells both in animal models and in vitro. For this, scientific articles were obtained from the Web of Science, LILACS, MEDLINE databases via PubMed, using keywords in English and the search strategy with the combination applying Boolean operators. In this way, ten articles were selected and for the analysis of the studies, data were extracted, such as the parts of the plant used, the identified compounds, the experimental model and main results involving the species. It was concluded that the studied extracts from U. dioica can act as anticancer in several mechanisms through the action of metabolism, inhibition of cell growth, induction of expressions of pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic genes and proteins involved in the apoptotic pathway in different in vitro cancer cell lines and animal models of cancer, due to their cytotoxic and antitumor properties. However, there was a scarcity of studies that focus on antioxidant activity, therefore, more investigations are necessary to identify the active compound(s) in U. dioica extracts.