Evaluation of anti-lipase activity of leaf and bark extracts from Aquilaria subintegra and A. malaccensis

Obesity is one of the serious health condition in the world and contributes to many chronic illnesses augmenting to high risk of death rate.With the purpose of obesity treatment, natural sources come to be significant to replace commercial drugs due to their harmful effect to the body.Therefore, a lot of studies were conducted on natural sources due to their potential as medicinal herbs.Aquilaria sp.plants are well known in traditional medicine as a sedative, analgesic and digestive.Even though there were no reports on applications of Aquilaria sp.towards obesity treatment, this plant has traditionally been used as laxative for weight reducing.In this study, the anti-lipase activity of an extract of barks and leaves from A. subintegra and A. malaccensis were investigated.The anti-lipase activity was measured by colorimetric assay on pancreatic lipase activity using porcine pancreatic lipase (PPL; triacylglycerol lipase, EC 3.1.1.3).The result indicated that among these two species of Aquilaria, A. malaccensis bark in dichloromethane crude showed high anti-lipase activity.Thus, these results suggest that Aquilaria sp.plant extracts might be of therapeutic interest with respect to the treatment.