Antibiotics are group of compounds preferred to treat any kind of acute or chronic infectious diseases. But 20-50% of antibiotics are used unnecessarily burdening the human body with new problems like disturbance of gastrointestinal flora, multiple drug resistance and other side effects. The present work is an effort to minimise these problems. One of the approaches is used in the present work by combining the antibiotics with plant extract to reduce the dose or dosing frequency of antibiotic. The present work employs Piper cubeba as herbal drug which was evaluated for pharmacognostic and physicochemical parameters. It was subjected to maceration with n-hexane. The n-hexane extract was evaluated by preliminary screening and the chromatographic analysis. The extract was combined with cefixime and its effect on antimicrobial activity of cefixime was noted. It was conducted using disc diffusion method against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. 20 µg/ml of cefixime alone and cefixime in combination with the concentrations of 500 µg/ml and 750 µg/ml of extracts was tested for zone of inhibition against above said microorganisms. It was observed that the antimicrobial activity was potentiated when combined with 750 µg/ml of extract mainly against E. coli. No much promising results were observed against S. aureus at any concentration. The potentiating activity may be due to the lignans and volatile oil components present in the extract. The therapeutic potentiation can occur either by pharmacodynamic interaction (synergism) and /or by pharmacokinetic (Cmax, AUC) interaction which needs to be investigated in future plans.
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