BACKGROUND: Therapeutic angiogenesis is a treatment modality for patients with chronic arterial insufficiency who do not have indication for direct reconstruction or angioplasty and who were not successfully submitted to clinical treatment. Prostaglandin E1 (PGE1) is one of the drugs used for this purpose. OBJECTIVE: To study morphologic aspects in the genesis of blood capillaries in the lower limb skeletal muscle of rats submitted to ischemia under the action of intramuscular (IM) or endovenous (EV) PGE1. METHODS: Forty-eight Wistar-UEM rats were randomly distributed into three groups of 16, equally redistributed into two subgroups, observed at the 7th and 14th days as follows: one control group, which had only limb ischemia; one group with ischemia and IM injection of PGE1; and one group with ischemia and EV injection of PGE1. To analyze the results, hematoxylin-eosin (HE) and immunohistochemical staining were used. RESULTS: There was a statistically significant increase in the number of capillaries in the subgroups using IM or EV PGE1, through counting in the samples containing HE staining. Immunostaining was not efficient for the quantification of capillaries. CONCLUSIONS: IM or EV PGE1 resulted in an increase in number of capillaries in the skeletal muscle of rats submitted to ischemia after 14 days of observation, which was histologically identifiable through HE staining. Immunostaining was not successful in establishing a correlation with the increase in vessels found in HE staining.
Prostaglandin E1; angiogenesis; ischemia
