| Summary: | Theopista Mzena, Hulda Swai,* Musa Chacha* School of Life Sciences and Bio-Engineering, Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Arusha, Tanzania *These authors contributed equally to this work Background: The search for new antimalarial drugs has become progressively urgent due to plasmodial resistance to most of the commercially available antimalarial drugs. As part of this effort, the study evaluated the antimalarial activity of Cucumis metuliferus and Lippia kituiensis, which are traditionally used in Tanzania for the treatment of malaria. Materials and methods: In vivo antimalarial activity was assessed using the 4-day suppressive antimalarial assay. Mice were infected by injecting via tail vein 1×107 erythrocytes infected by Plasmodium berghei ANKA. Extracts were administered orally; chloroquine (10mg/kg/day) and dimethyl sulfoxide (5mL/kg/day) were used as positive and negative controls, respectively. The level of parasitemia, survival time, packed cell volume (PCV) and variation in body weight of mice were used to determine the antimalarial activity of the extract. Results: The ethyl acetate, methanolic and chloroform extracts of C. metuliferus and L. kituiensis significantly (p<0.05) inhibited parasitemia in a dose-dependent manner and prevented loss of body weight at the dose levels of 600mg/kg and 1500mg/kg, respectively. In addition, the extracts prolonged the mean survival time of P. berghei-infected mice compared to the non-treated control. The plant extracts did not show reduction of PCV except at the low dose of 300mg/kg. The highest suppression was recorded at the dose level of 1,500mg/kg. At this dose, C. metuliferus in chloroform, methanolic and ethyl acetate extracts had percentage suppression of 98.55%, 88.89% and 84.39%, respectively, whereas L. kituiensis in ethyl acetate, chloroform and methanolic extracts exhibited suppression of the pathogens of 95.19%, 93.88% and 74.83%, respectively. Conclusion: It is worth reporting that the two plants induced suppression ...
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