Herbal medicine for liver protection in experimental animals - a histochemical, pathological study

Pien Tze Huang (PTH) is a mixture of several agents of traditional medicine prescribed over 600 years ago by a retired Court Physician, for conditions of liver diseases in southern China. For all these hundreds of years til the present day, PTH traditional medicine has been widely taken orally by the ethnic communities not only in China but also in the Southeast Asia as a hepatoprotective drug. Previous animal studies on this traditional drug revealed that it could indeed protect liver damage against carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) insults in mice model and hepatoma culture. After drug treatment of PTH, increased level of markers responsible to tackle superoxide formation and upregulated immune activities were evident [1]. The present study attempted to evaluate the further hepatoprotective effect of this drug against bile duct ligation and acute intoxication of alcohol in the mouse model, employing biochemistry and histochemistry, along with histopathological observations. After bile duct ligation and acute alcohol treatment, both lactic dehydrogenase (LDH) positive cells (indicating necrosis) and terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) positive cells (indicating apoptosis) went up in these experimental animals, along with an increase in transaminase. Histopathological observation indicated increase in fibrosis starting 10 days after bile duct ligation or 7 days after acute alcohol model. However, in those animals with PTH treatment which had either bile duct ligation or acute alcohol treatment, the number of necrotic and apoptotic cells decreased when compared with those experimental animals without PTH treatment. Concurrently, there was also a downregulation of the transaminase and the extent of fibrosis after PTH treatment in the experimental animals of both ligation and alcohol treated groups. Transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta) positive cells also increased in number in the bile duct ligated mice but not in the acute alcohol treated mice. In the former group, PTH treatment was effective in the downregulation of the increase of TGF-beta cells in the liver. In addition, PTH treatment enhanced the proliferation of cells in the liver after bile duct ligation and acute alcohol treatment, thus helpful in regeneration as well. On the whole, the PTH treatment which had been used for more than 600 years appeared to have definitive protective effects on the liver after injury as demonstrated in this study of the mice model.