Research Article Osteoprotective Effect of Cordycepin on Estrogen Deficiency-Induced Osteoporosis In Vitro and In Vivo

Copyright © 2015 Da-wei Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The purpose of this study was to verify the effect of cordycepin on ovariectomized osteopenic rats. Fifty Wistar female rats used were divided into 5 groups: (1) sham-operation rats (control), (2) ovariectomized (OVX) rats with osteopenia, and (3) OVX’d rats with osteopenia treated with cordycepin (5mg, 10mg, and 20mg) for 8 weeks. After the rats were treated orally with cordycepin, serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP), tartrate resistant acid phosphatase (TRAP), serum osteocalcin (OC), homocysteine (HCY), C-terminal crosslinked telopeptides of collagen type I (CTX) level, and oxidative stress were examined, respectively. The femoral neck was used for mechanical compression testing. At the same time, we further investigated the effect of cordycepin in vitro assay. The beneficial effects of cordycepin on improvement of osteoporosis in rats were attributablemainly to decrease ALP activity, TRAP activity, and CTX level. At the same time, cordycepin also increases the OC level in ovariectomized osteopenic rats.The histological examination clearly showed that dietary cordycepin can prevent bone loss caused by estrogen deficiency.These experimental results suggest that complement cordycepin is protective after ovariectomized osteopenic in specific way. 1