A Garden Shrub Known as Blood Tonic Shielded Mouse Pancreas Cells From Inflammatory Damage

Deep in the pancreas, tucked among the islets of Langerhans, sit the alpha cells. Their job is to make glucagon, the hormone that nudges blood sugar back up when it dips too low. They are quiet, unglamorous workers. And they turn out to be surprisingly fragile when inflammation sweeps through the organ that houses them.

That fragility is the thread running through a study from Delta State University in Abraka, Nigeria, published in the Journal of Exploratory Research in Pharmacology. The researchers wanted to know whether the leaves of a flowering shrub could keep those alpha cells working when the pancreas came under chemical assault.

The shrub in question is Justicia carnea, sometimes called Pink jacobinia, and grown across the subtropics as an ornamental. In southern Nigeria it carries weightier names. The Yoruba call it Ewe eje and the Igbo Ogwuobara, both of which translate, more or less, to blood tonic. People have long used Justicia species against a grab-bag of complaints: anemia, arthritis, diabetes, assorted gut troubles. What the plant actually does inside an inflamed pancreas, though, nobody had really pinned down.

Building a Pancreas Under Siege

So the team built a model of the problem. Chronic pancreatitis is notoriously hard to treat, with most care aimed at easing symptoms rather than mending the underlying damage. Globally there were more than six million cases of pancreatitis reported in a single recent year, and when the acute form tips into its severe variant, there are still no drugs that target the disease directly. Supportive care, fluids, pain relief: that is roughly the state of the art.

To recreate that damage in the lab, they turned to a chemical with the cumbersome name trinitrobenzenesulfonic acid, TNBS for short. It is a workhorse of inflammation research, usually deployed to trigger colitis, but its mischief spreads well beyond the gut: systemic oxidative stress, immune activation, a flood of reactive molecules that batter cell membranes. Twenty-five male mice were sorted into five groups. One got a harmless saline control, one got TNBS alone, two got TNBS followed by the leaf extract at 200 or 400 milligrams per kilogram, and the last got TNBS plus sulfasalazine, an established anti-inflammatory drug, as a benchmark.

Reading the Damage in the Chemistry

The numbers from the TNBS-only group make for grim reading. Glutathione, one of the body’s frontline antioxidants, crashed from about 7.16 micromoles per gram of healthy pancreatic tissue down to 0.89. Malondialdehyde, a marker of membranes being chewed apart, nearly tripled. Nitric oxide jumped roughly fivefold. On a histology scale that tops out at 21 for total wreckage, the untreated pancreases scored 19. Edema, hemorrhage, dead tissue, the lot.

Then came the extract. Mice given Justicia after their TNBS dose looked, by most of these measures, almost like the healthy controls. Glutathione bounced back above 9. Malondialdehyde settled around 20 again. That histology score of 19 dropped to 3 at the lower dose and 2 at the higher one, which, oddly enough, matched the sulfasalazine benchmark almost exactly.

And the alpha cells? Staining the tissue for glucagon told the rest of the story. In the TNBS-only pancreases, glucagon expression had fallen away, the alpha cells apparently casualties of the oxidative and inflammatory storm around them. That matters because chronic pancreatitis can wreck the islets badly enough to throw glucose control off balance, sometimes leaving patients with a diabetes that arrives in the wake of the inflammation. In the treated mice, that glucagon signal was largely preserved. The plant had not just calmed the inflammation; it had, in a sense, kept the hormone factory running.

Why might a leaf extract pull this off? The likeliest answer lies in what Justicia carries: phenols, flavonoids, alkaloids, plus trace minerals like selenium and zinc, the sort of phytochemical cocktail that mops up reactive oxygen species and dials down the enzymes of inflammation. Lower lipase, lower amylase, lower C-reactive protein in the treated animals all point the same way.

It is worth keeping the enthusiasm on a leash, mind you. This is twenty-five mice, not a clinic full of patients. The team themselves flag the gaps: they used a crude extract rather than isolating whichever compounds did the work, ran no proper dose-response curve (the two doses landed in roughly the same place, which is itself a bit of a puzzle), and kept the study short enough that long-term safety remains an open question. A chemical-induced model in a mouse, however reproducible, is not a human pancreas with its own messy history.

Still, there is something quietly compelling about an ornamental shrub, a thing people grow for its pink flowers, turning in a performance that tracks a pharmaceutical drug across nearly every marker measured. If the effect holds up in better-designed trials, and that remains a sizeable if, the next task is to work out which molecules in the leaf are doing the heavy lifting, and whether they can do it in a body rather more complicated than a mouse’s. The alpha cells, for now, will have to wait.

Source: Journal of Exploratory Research in Pharmacology, doi:10.14218/JERP.2025.00044

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Justicia carnea, and why are researchers testing it on the pancreas?

Justicia carnea is a tropical flowering shrub, often grown as an ornamental and known in parts of Nigeria as a blood tonic. It is rich in antioxidant phytochemicals like flavonoids and phenols, which is why researchers wondered whether its leaf extract could blunt the oxidative damage that drives pancreatic inflammation. This study tested that idea in mice.

What did the leaf extract actually do in the mice?

Mice given a pancreas-damaging chemical showed collapsed antioxidant levels, severe tissue damage, and a drop in glucagon-producing cells. Those later treated with the extract recovered most of their antioxidant markers, showed far milder tissue damage, and largely kept their glucagon expression intact. The effect roughly matched an established anti-inflammatory drug used as a comparison.

Why does preserving glucagon matter?

Glucagon is the hormone that raises blood sugar when it falls too low, and it is made by alpha cells in the pancreas. When inflammation destroys those cells, glucose control can go awry, which is one route to diabetes following pancreatitis. Protecting glucagon-producing cells therefore hints at a benefit beyond simply calming inflammation.

Does this mean the plant could treat pancreatitis in people?

Not yet, and possibly not for a while. This was a small, short study in 25 mice using a chemically induced model that only approximates human disease, and the researchers used a crude extract without isolating the active compounds. Human trials would be needed before anyone could say whether it helps patients.