Epilepsy affects about 40 million people worldwide. Many drugs block
seizures, but have little effect in preventing or curing this disease. So the search for new drugs for
epilepsy treatment using animal models prior to testing in humans is important. Increasingly pharmaceutical industries invest in the Research &
Drug Development area to seek safe and effective new therapeutic alternatives to the currently available
epilepsy treatment. In this perspective, natural compounds have been investigated in
epilepsy models, particularly the
monoterpenes obtained from medicinal plants. In our study we investigated the effects of
cyane-carvone (CC), a synthetic substance prepared from natural a
monoterpene,
carvone, against
pilocarpine- (PILO),
pentylenetetrazole- (PTZ) and picrotoxine (PTX)-induced
seizures in mice after acute treatment with repeated oral doses (
CC 25, 50 and 75 mg/kg) for 14 days. CC in all doses tested showed increase in latency to first seizure, decrease in percentages of seizuring animals as well as reduction percentages of dead animals (p<0.05) in PILO, PTZ and PTX groups when compared with vehicle. However, these effects were not reversed by
flumazenil,
benzodiazepine (BZD) antagonist used to investigate the CC action mechanism. Our results suggest that acute treatment with CC at the doses tested can exert
anticonvulsant effects in PILO, PTZ and PTX
epilepsy models. In addition, our data suggest that CC could act in an allosteric site of GABAA, which would be different from the site in which BDZ acts, since
flumazenil was not able to reverse any of CC effects on the modulation of seizure parameters related with
epilepsy models investigated. New studies should be conducted to investigate CC effects in other
neurotransmitter systems. Nevertheless, our study reinforces the hypothesis that CC could be used, after further research, as a new
pharmaceutical formulation and a promising alternative for
epilepsy treatment, since it showed
anticonvulsant effects.