ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Toxicol.
Sec. Food and Nutritional Toxicology
A new kind of ultrasonic water alleviates constipation with favorable safety
Provisionally accepted
Jiarong Hu1
Xinyi Hu1Wenjie Huang1,2Fen Wang1Zhongqi Xia1
Chenyang Zhu1Junwei Chow1Shiwei Yan1Longzhou Li1Haiyang Liu1
Guo Ma1*- 1School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Advanced Drug Formulations for Overcoming Delivery Barriers, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
- 2Department of pharmacy, Huashan Hospital Fudan University, Shanghai, China
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Ultrasonic water (UW) is a new type of functional drinking water. In the study, the SD rats with constipation were established to explore the purgative effect and mechanisms of UW. Safety of UW was evaluated by acute oral toxicity test, subacute oral toxicity test, micronucleus test of bone marrow cells, and Ames test. The results indicated that UW significantly improved constipation symptoms of the test SD rats, with a significant increase in body weight (16.03 ± 5.32%) compared to the model group (8.67 ± 4.02%, P < 0.05). Compared to the model group, serum levels of excitatory gastrointestinal hormones were significantly elevated 4.20% (motilin), 10.87% (substance P), 36.69% (vasoactive intestinal peptide) and 12.89% (acetylcholinesterase) (P < 0.05), while somatostatin, was markedly reduced 22.40% (P < 0.05), respectively. Acute oral LD50 values of UW were higher than 20000 mg/kg, indicating practical non-toxicity. In the subacute toxicity test, compared to those in the control group, performances, blood routine indexes and serum biochemical indexes of the rats in the UW group showed no statistical difference (P > 0.05), and all the organs and tissues of the rats in both groups maintained normal morphology. Micronucleus effect of UW was not found when the dosage of UW was up to 20000 mg/kg. UW also showed no mutagenic activity on standard test strains. In summary, UW exhibited favorable purgative effect and safety.
Keywords: ultrasonic water, Constipation, Purgative effect, Safety, toxicity test
Received: 25 Aug 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hu, Hu, Huang, Wang, Xia, Zhu, Chow, Yan, Li, Liu and Ma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Guo Ma, mg0328@fudan.edu.cn
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