Mengdie Yu¹, Fengxin Cui¹, Yiran Zhang¹, Keke Zhang¹, Xin Wang¹, Yinuo Zhang¹, Zilu Wang¹, Yang Liu¹, Wei Shi²

Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan City, Shandong, China.

Correspondence: Wei Shi, Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, No.16369 Jingshi Road, Jinan, Shandong 250014, China

Objective: To investigate the efficacy of Trans-Cinnamaldehyde (TC) in inhibiting the invasion and migration of adenomyosis (AM) and to explore its mechanism of action.

Population or Sample: Human endometrium tissues were obtained from AM patients who underwent total hysterectomy for AM in the Linyi Central Hospital from September 2019 to May 2021 with patients 41 years old and 45 years old.

Method: The effect of TC in AMDC by CCK-8, immunofluorescence, transwell invasion assay, cell wound scratch assay and western blot analysis the protein for Rho/ROCK signaling pathway.

Results: AMDC was characterized with strongly positive staining for Vimentin and almost negative for CK7, VWF, E-cadherin, SMA. CCK-8 for IC50 = 28.93±0.44 μg/mL and IC50 = 27.67±0.72 μg/mL at 48h. The final concentrations of TC (0, 6, 12 μg/mL) were selected of the cell cytotoxicity, T-text test group >0.05. With increasing TC concentration, cytoskeleton fluorescence intensity, cell invasion and migration ability diminished, and Rho/ROCK-related protein expression was significantly downregulated.

Conclusions: TC inhibits the invasive migratory ability of AMDC by regulating the Rho/ROCK signaling pathway to affect cytoskeletal rearrangement with a dose-dependent, which are involved in the pathophysiology of adenomyosis.