Abstract

In recent years, Iranian traditional medicine has been used to treat various diseases such as anemia. One of these plants is Ocimum basilicum L. In this experiment, we evaluated the anti-anemia and antioxidant properties of aqueous extract of O. basilicum in phenylhydrazine-induced anemic rats. 2,2-Diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging test was used to examine the antioxidant property of O. basilicum aqueous extract, which indicated high antioxidant property compared to butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) as the positive control. In vivo design, after 1 day of the last injection of phenylhydrazine, the rats were divided into five subgroups, including negative healthy control, untreated negative control, and three groups receiving the O. basilicum at 20, 60, and 180 mg/kg concentrations. At the end of day 15 of treatment, the animals of all groups were euthanized and blood samples were drawn immediately from the animals’ hearts to analyze the hematological and biochemical parameters. The data were analyzed by SPSS-21 software. Several doses of O. basilicum (especially O180) significantly (p ≤ 0.05) enhanced the levels of body weight, WBC, neutrophils, monocytes, platelet, RBC, Hb, PCV, MCV, MCH, MCHC, and reduced the raised levels of ALP, AST, ALT, GGT, urea, creatinine, ferrous, ferritin, and erythropoietin as compared to the untreated group. In conclusion, the obtained results revealed the anti-anemia and antioxidant properties of aqueous extract of O. basilicum. Extraction of active molecules will be the future work to peruse. © 2018, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.