Abstract

The World Health Organization has classified the leishmaniasis as a major tropical disease. Current therapy is toxic, expensive and cause several adverse effects. The majority of people in endemic areas of leishmaniasis depend of natural and traditional medicine. This study was developed to examine the activity of the essential oil from Chenopodium ambrosioides in BALB/c mice infected with Leishmania amazonensis. The infected animals received two cycle of treatment by different routes (intraperitoneal, oral or intralesional route). The intraperitoneal administration of the essential oil at dose of 30 mg/Kg prevented lesion development and decrease the parasite burden. Oral administration retarded the infection in the experimental model compared with untreated mice, although it was less effective that the intraperitoneal route. The administration by intralesional route did not show activity. Intraperitoneal and oral treatment at 30 mg/Kg with the essential oil had better antileishmanial effect that treatment with the reference drug, amphotericin B at 1 mg/Kg. Preliminarily, we examined the toxicity and the resistance after treatment. Signs of toxicity were evident only in the animals treated by intraperitoneal route. No resistance was detected in L. amazonensis isolates obtained from treated mice. These data clearly demonstrated that this natural product could be an alternative for the development of a new drug against cutaneous leishmaniasis based in the ethnomedical information.