Protective effect of dimethylthiourea against mucosal injury in rat stomach. Implications for hydroxyl radical mechanism.

The present study was undertaken to determine whether dimethylthiourea (DMTU), a hydroxyl radical scavenger, could prevent gastric injury in the rat stomach induced by various noxious agents. Fasted rats (N = 6-8/group) were given a 1-ml oral bolus of saline or DMTU over the dose range 10-500 mg/kg. After 30 min, animals received 1 ml of 100% ethanol orally and were sacrificed 5 min later. At sacrifice, stomachs were harvested and the degree of macroscopic damage was assessed by planimetry. In selected animals, specimens of gastric mucosa were also processed for histology. Saline pretreatment prior to ethanol exposure resulted in 22.5% injury to the glandular epithelium when assessed macroscopically. DMTU pretreatment prevented such injury in a dose-related fashion with only 2% of the mucosa showing injury with a 500 mg/kg dose (P less than 0.01 vs control). Although the superficial injury involving surface mucous cells induced by ethanol was not altered by DMTU, the deep damage to gastric glands was almost completely prevented. Other experiments in which DMTU was given intraperitoneally demonstrated similar protective effects against ethanol injury. Additional studies showed that indomethacin did not prevent the protective effects of oral or intraperitoneal DMTU, excluding a role for endogenous prostaglandins, and that DMTU was equally protective when administered within minutes or as long as 2 hr prior to ethanol exposure. Furthermore, DMTU was also shown to be protective against gastric injury induced by concentrated acid or base. In in vitro studies in which hydroxyl radicals were actually generated, DMTU was noted to scavenge the hydroxyl radical in a dose-related fashion. The ability of DMTU to prevent gastric injury by three different damaging agents suggests that the hydroxyl radical may play a major role in the pathogenesis of such injury and that DMTU mediated its protective action by scavenging this radical species.