Effects of Homeopathic Treatments on Human Cellular Inflammation In Vitro

The reliability of homeopathic treatments can be analyzed through various experimental approaches, but the problems of standardization of pharmacological profiles have never been systematically resolved. However, recently, claims about the efficacy of homeopathic medicines have been revisited using validated pharmacological assays. The aim of this work was to study the effects of some selected homeopathic treatments in reference to oxidative stress by using standardized models of cellular toxicity and through a three-dimensional model of intestine. Since homeopathic Arsenic is one of the main remedies for inflammation following oxidative stress, the effects of some dilutions of Arsenic were studied. In particular, the dermal fibroblast cells L929, recognized as an official test at European level for toxicity studies, were treated with H₂O₂ and the effects of the different dilutions of Arsenic were evaluated on three cellular models. The “healthy” model, where the cells were treated with the different potencies of Arsenic, the “curative model,” where the Arsenic stimuli were applied after the cellular treatment with H₂O₂, and the “preventive model,” where the stimuli were added before the cellular treatment with H₂O₂. The effects of the treatments were evaluated by MTT cell proliferation assay, according to the standard ISO10993–5. A selection of the dilutions able to induce significant anti-oxidative effects were then added to a reconstructed human intestine, obtained by seeding human intestinal cells on “equivalent dermis,” where monocytes and fibroblasts were plated together with collagen I. Gut equivalent models were treated or not with H₂O₂ and one selected dilution of Arsenic was added to the samples. Hematoxylin and eosin analyses showed that the Arsenic dilution previously selected was able to partially recover the oxidative stress induced by H₂O_2.

Keywords: Oxidative stress, Arsenic, cellular models, MTT, intestinal reconstruction

Publication History

Article published online:
30 January 2024