Aqueous ozone therapy improves the standard treatment of leishmaniasis lesions in animals leading to local and systemic alterations

Topical application of ozonated sunflower oil accelerates the healing of lesions of cutaneous leishmaniasis in mice under meglumine antimoniate treatment

Besides being scarce, the drugs available for treating cutaneous leishmaniasis have many adverse effects. Ozone is an option to enhance the standard treatment due to the wound-healing activity reported in the literature. In this study, we evaluated the efficiency of ozonated sunflower oil as an adjuvant in treating cutaneous lesions caused by Leishmania amazonensis. BALB/c mice were infected with L. amazonensis, and after the lesions appeared, they were treated in four different schedules using the drug treatment with meglumine antimoniate (Glucantime®), with or without ozonated oil. After thirty days of treatment, the lesions' thickness and their parasitic burden, blood leukocytes, production of NO and cytokines from peritoneal macrophages and lymph node cells were analyzed. The group treated with ozonated oil plus meglumine antimoniate showed the best performance, improving the lesion significantly. The parasitic burden showed that ozonated oil enhanced the leishmanicidal activity of the treatment, eliminating the parasites in the lesion. Besides, a decrease in the TNF levels from peritoneal macrophages and blood leukocytes demonstrated an immunomodulatory action of ozone in the ozonated oil-treated animals compared to the untreated group. Thus, ozonated sunflower oil therapy has been shown as an adjuvant in treating Leishmania lesions since this treatment enhanced the leishmanicidal and wound healing effects of meglumine antimoniate.

Ozone and its derivatives in veterinary medicine: A careful appraisal

The therapeutic use of ozone and its derivatives in the veterinary medicine it is still in an emergent stage. Gaseous ozone chemical instability makes necessary its extemporaneous preparation and the accordance about ozone treatments with the highest quality standards in publications is of paramount importance. Moreover, the numerous method of administration in different animal species, the prevalence of case reports, the deficiency of consistent evaluation of the outcomes, as well as the lack of standardization of the treatment operating procedures represents an open question for its spreading and official approval. The keywords "ozone", "ozonated", "ozonation" "ozonized", "ozonization", "oxygen-ozone therapy", "veterinary", "pets", "animal" were used to perform a literature review using PubMed, Cochrane, Google Scholar, Zotero databases with the temporal restriction for published manuscripts starting from 2010. All the researches were critically evaluated, regardless of the impact factor, if any, of the journals in which they were presented. The deepening of the mechanisms of action of this bio-oxidative therapy can open new horizons on its use. The distinctive condition to achieve such a scenario is an improved knowledge of the qualitative/quantitative characteristics of ozone and its derivatives. All with the aim of taking nothing away to the cited original research papers, but of improving the promising therapeutic implications of ozone therapy in veterinary medicine as a standardization stimulus about this therapeutic resource with multiple application specificities.

Insights on the mechanisms of action of ozone in the medical therapy against COVID-19

An increasing amount of reports in the literature is showing that medical ozone (O3) is used, with encouraging results, in treating COVID-19 patients, optimizing pain and symptoms relief, respiratory parameters, inflammatory and coagulation markers and the overall health status, so reducing significantly how much time patients underwent hospitalization and intensive care. To date, aside from mechanisms taking into account the ability of O3 to activate a rapid oxidative stress response, by up-regulating antioxidant and scavenging enzymes, no sound hypothesis was addressed to attempt a synopsis of how O3 should act on COVID-19. The knowledge on how O3 works on inflammation and thrombosis mechanisms is of the utmost importance to make physicians endowed with new guns against SARS-CoV2 pandemic. This review tries to address this issue, so to expand the debate in the scientific community.