Gekpe et al. 2023 - Cadmium, quercetin, and omega-3 in rats

Gekpe and colleagues tested whether quercetin and omega-3 fatty acid altered cadmium-induced changes in nitric-oxide, antioxidant, and malondialdehyde endpoints in rats. This is lane a4 toxicology and co-treatment context, not olive-oil occurrence evidence: cadmium chloride was deliberately administered, and olive oil was used only as a sham-control vehicle. The paper reports cadmium dose, LD50, group size, and source-printed serum biomarker values for several endpoints.

Key numbers

• Main experiment: seven groups with n = 6 rats per group, treated for 56 days.
• Acute toxicity: the source reports cadmium chloride LD50 = 3.90 mg/kg body weight; the experimental cadmium test dose was 2.0 mg/kg.
• Cadmium exposure in the main experiment: cadmium chloride at 2mg/kg body weight, intraperitoneally, once every 5 days.
• Co-treatment doses: quercetin 20mg/kg subcutaneously; omega-3 fatty acid 14.29mg/kg orally; combined group received both 20mg/kg quercetin and 14.29mg/kg omega-3.
• Vehicle/sham controls: DMSO (2%) at 1mL/kg orally once daily; olive oil 0.1 mL/kg orally once daily.
• Nitric oxide activity, controls vs Cd group: NC 34.05 ± 0.45, SC-1 35.21 ±1.48, SC-2 34.63 ± 0.70, and Cd 27.09 ± 0.90 µmol/L; the Cd group was significantly lower at p<0.05.
• Nitric oxide synthase activity, controls vs Cd group: NC 15.92 ± 0.14, SC-1 16.03 ± 0.48, SC-2 15.60 ± 0.56, and Cd 11.69 ± 0.46 µmol/L; the Cd group was significantly lower at p<0.05.
• Superoxide dismutase activity, controls vs Cd group: NC 9.24 ± 0.12, SC-1 9.33 ± 0.10, SC-2 9.43 ± 0.10, and Cd 5.95 ± 0.39 ng/mL; the Cd group was significantly lower at p<0.05.
• Catalase activity, controls and treatment groups: NC 80.99 ± 0.65, SC-1 78.33 ±1.70, SC-2 79.40 ±1.25, Cd 59.16 ±1.11, Cd + QT 60.94 ± 0.30, Cd + OM-3 66.15 ±1.46, and Cd + QT + OM-3 66.38 ±1.24 pg/mL.
• Glutathione peroxidase control values: NC 3.66 ± 0.27, SC-1 4.08 ± 0.19, and SC-2 3.95 ± 0.16 ng/mL; the text states significant p<0.05 reductions in the Cd-treated group, but the extracted paragraph repeats 5.95 ± 0.39, which conflicts with the described reduction and Figure 23.
• Malondialdehyde control values: NC 12.75 ± 0.08, SC-1 12.34 ± 0.19, and SC-2 12.50 ± 0.21 nmol/mL; the source states that the Cd-treated group increased significantly at p<0.05, but the exact Cd-group MDA mean is not cleanly extractable from the text.

Methods (brief)

The authors used male Wistar rats from the animal house of the Department of Physiology, University of Calabar, Nigeria. Cadmium chloride, quercetin, omega-3 fatty acid, DMSO, and olive-oil vehicle groups were compared after a 56-day regimen. Serum NO and NOS were assayed by Griess-reagent nitrite measurement; SOD, CAT, GPx, and MDA were measured using spectrophotometric or ELISA-style assays described in the methods. Data were presented as mean ± SEM and analyzed by one-way ANOVA followed by Tukey post hoc test in SPSS Version 25.0, with P<0.05 considered significant.

Implications

Certification: This paper should not enter any olive-oil, omega-3, or quercetin occurrence pool. It is controlled cadmium toxicology evidence and records biomarkers after deliberate cadmium chloride administration.

Courses: Useful for teaching why animal toxicology papers belong in the corpus after the 2026-06-10 scope widening while remaining firewalled from product occurrence pools. It also illustrates why vehicle ingredients must not become product routes.

App: Supports cadmium toxicology context on the metal page. It does not support an ingredient contamination profile, consumer-product row, or HMTc threshold input.

Microbiome: No microbiome endpoints.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• cadmium
• index

Verification notes

• Recovered under the 2026-06-10 inclusion-by-default rule, lane a4 exposure and health effect, with adjacent co-treatment context. Prior skip was skip:not-food-occurrence because the paper had no consumer-product occurrence table.
• DOI, title, authors, journal, open-access license, cadmium dose, LD50, main group size, treatment duration, co-treatment doses, NO/NOS/SOD/CAT values, GPx control values, MDA control values, p-value thresholds, and methods were checked against the extracted PDF text on 2026-06-11.
• Units are preserved exactly as printed in the source: mg/kg, mg/kg body weight, mL/kg, µmol/L, ng/mL, pg/mL, and nmol/mL. Dosing strings such as 2mg/kg and 20mg/kg retain the source spacing.
• Speciation: the source uses cadmium chloride exposure and reports cadmium as Cd/cadmium; no cadmium speciation beyond the administered compound is reported.
• Products and ingredients are intentionally empty. Olive oil appears only as a vehicle/sham-control dose and is not a measured product matrix.
• The paper contains internal inconsistencies: the abstract says 42 Wistar rats were assigned into seven groups of six, while the methods also mention 48 rats for the main experiment; sample_n uses the internally consistent seven groups times six rats. The GPx and MDA result paragraphs contain extract/OCR or source-text inconsistencies, so unclear treatment means are not used as exact values.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.