Effects of Dietary Milk Thistle (Silybum marianum) Supplementation in Ducks Fed Mycotoxin-Contaminated Diets

The medicinal plant milk thistle (Silybum marianum) has been widely used due to its hepatoprotective properties. The main objective of our study was to investigate the health protective effects of dietary milk thistle seed (MS), oil (MO), and seed cake (MSC) in ducks fed diets naturally contaminated with deoxynivalenol (DON; 3.43–3.72 mg/kg feed) and zearalenone (ZEN; 0.46–0.50 mg/kg feed). Female White Hungarian ducks were randomly allocated to four dietary treatments consisting of the control diet (C), the control diet supplemented with 0.5% MS, 0.5% MSC, or 0.1% MO. The feeding of experimental diets did not result in mortality cases, clinical signs of mycotoxicosis, or in differences of clinical chemistry values of blood serum. The positive effect of MO on vacuolar hepatocyte degeneration exceeded that of the MSC on d14 and both MS and MSC on d42. Each treatment was equally effective in the decrease of the severity of solitary cell death and infiltration of lympho- and histiocytes in the liver on d28 as well as in the prevention of lymphocyte depletion in the spleen and bursa of Fabricius on d14. In conclusion, the applied treatments have been proven effective in the prevention of histopathological changes caused by DON and ZEN.