Ioxidant activities, demonstrated anti-proliferative effects against breast?2012 Abrahim et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abrahim et al. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2012, 12:220 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/12/Page 2 ofcancer cell lines [1,2]. This has prompted further studies investigating the possible involvement of antioxidantrich plants as anticancer agents. Piper betle is a medicinal plant that is traditionally used in catarrhal and pulmonary affections, as a digestive and carminative and as a stimulant of pancreatic lipase [4-6]. P. betle belongs to the Piperaceae family and is thought to originate from South East Asia. The leaves of the plant are commonly chewed with areca nut. Scientifically, studies have reported the biological benefits of P. betle to include inhibition of platelet aggregation [7], anti-diabetic activities [8], immunomodulatory properties [9] and anti-allergic activities [10]. Some of these observed biological activities were attributed to the high antioxidant activities of this plant [11,12]. Several studies have been conducted on the effect of P. betle in reducing various types of tumors. The aqueous extract of P. betle prevented formation of tumors when fed to rats in the initiation phase of induced-mammary carcinogenesis but could not inhibit tumor growth when fed to rats with induced mammary carcinogenesis [13]. Furthermore, the leaves of P. betle has strong anti-tumor promoting activities in Raji cells [14] whereas the aqueous extract was reported to show anti-proliferative action towards kB cells, indicating their potential in treating oral cancer [15]. Not much data is RR6 site available on the anti-proliferative effects of P. betle on breast cancer. Since this plant contains high antioxidant activities, it can potentially exhibit antiproliferative effects. Due to the current interest in the potential effects of antioxidants from natural products in breast cancer treatment, we attempted to investigate the antioxidant activities and cytotoxic effect of the leaves of P. betle against the breast cancer cell line, MCF-7. Studies have reported the antioxidant activities of P. betle leaf in aqueous extracts [8,11,16]. In this study, we report the effect of solvents of varying polarities on the antioxidant activities of the leaves of P. betle. We also investigated the anti-proliferative and antioxidant status of the various plant extracts on PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27607577 the breast cancer cell line, MCF-7.Sample preparationThe leaves of Piper betle were cleaned of any dirt and rinsed with water. The leaves were left to air-dry and subsequently ground into powder and was kept at -20 for further analyses. The dried powder was extracted through sequential extraction using hexane, ethyl acetate, methanol and water. Briefly, 10 g of the powder was mixed with 100 ml of hexane and was left to stir on a hot plate at a temperature of 40 . The extract was filtered after 6 h and the resulting residue was re-extracted twice with the same solvent. The extraction process was continued with the remaining residue using solvents of increasing polarity, with each extraction performed three times using the same solvent. The hexane, ethyl acetate and methanol extracts fro.
