Hepatoprotective Effects of Herbal Medicines Against Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: A Systematic Review of Clinical and in Vivo Studies Publisher



Moayyedkazemi A^{1, 2} ; Amraei M³ ; Nejad EB⁴ ; Moghaddam A⁵ ; Karami K⁶ ; Baharvand P⁷
Source: Current Traditional Medicine Published:2021

Abstract

Background: In this systematic review, we mainly emphasis on the current advances on the hepatoprotective effects of medicinal herbs in the Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Diseases (NAFLD) treatment. Methods: This review was done based on the 06-PRISMA guideline and registered in the CAMA-RADES-NC3Rs Preclinical Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Facility (SyRF) database. We did all the research in scientific databases in some English language databases, such as Web of Sci-ence, PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, and EMBASE, with no limitation in time to find the in vivo and clinical investigations on hepatoprotective effects of herbal medicines on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The selected words and terms for our search were: “fatty liver”, “extract”, “es-sential oil”, “clinical trial”, “herbal medicine”, “medicinal plants”, and “non-alcoholic fatty liver”. Results: Out of 21230 papers, 28 papers including 21 in vivo (75.0%), and 7 clinical trials (25.0%) up to 2020, met the inclusion criteria for discussion in this systematic review. The most part used of plants were leaves (14, 50.0%), rhizome (4, 14.3%), seeds (3, 10.3%), respectively. The most formulations of medicinal herbs were extracts essential oil (9, 35.7%) followed by ethanolic extract (5, 17.8%). The most animals used in vivo studies were rats (12, 42.8%) followed by mice (9, 32.1%). The obtained results also showed that the most period of administrated by these plants were 12 weeks (6, 21.4%), 2 months (6, 21.4%), and 30 days (3, 10.7%), respectively. Conclusion: The obtained findings of the present review demonstrated that medicinal plants due to high availability, high efficacy, and low or minimal toxicity are considered as a valuable and prop-er alternative to chemical synthetic drugs to treat and prevent of NAFLD. However, further studies especially on the toxicity of these agents are required to approve these recommendations. © 2021 Bentham Science Publishers.