studies of human hbaa erythrocyte osmotic fragility index of non-malarious blood in the presence of five anti-malarial drugs

background: the capacity of human hbaa erythrocytes of non-malarious blood to withstand osmotic stress in the presence of five antimalarial drugs, chloroquine phosphate, quinine, fansidartm, coartemtm and halfantm was studied in vitro. materials and methods: aqueous solutions of four increasing concentrations of the drugs used in this investigation were in the order: 0.2%, 0.4%, 0.6% and 0.8% (w/v). spectrophotometric method was employed to ascertain the osmotic fragility index of the erythrocytes. the mean corpuscular fragility (mcf) index (x+s.d) of the control sample was 0.351+0.06 g/100ml. the mcf values of the control and test samples were statistically compared (p value = 0.05). results: at the drug concentration of 0.8g, mcf values (g) of 0.401±0.005, 0.391±0.003, 0.364±0.02, 0.344±0.02 and 0.338±0.04 were obtained for halfan, coartem, quinine, chloroquine phosphate and fansidar, respectively. conclusion: an overview of the results showed that in a concentration dependent manner, choroquine phosphate and fansidartm exhibited a diminishing capacity to stabilize red blood cell membrane while halfantm coartemtm and quinine elicited an increasing propensity to disrupt erythrocyte membrane integrity.