The Role of Oxidative Stress and Antioxidants in Liver Diseases

By Sha Li, H. Tan, Ning Wang, Zhangjin Zhang, L. Lao, C. Wong, Yibin Feng. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2015

1,632 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A complex antioxidant system has been developed in mammals to relieve oxidative stress. However, excessive reactive species derived from oxygen and nitrogen may still lead to oxidative damage to tissue and organs. Oxidative stress has been considered as a conjoint pathological mechanism, and it contributes to initiation and progression of liver injury. A lot of risk factors, including alcohol, drugs, environmental pollutants and irradiation, may induce oxidative stress in liver, which in turn results in severe liver diseases, such as alcoholic liver disease and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. Application of antioxidants signifies a rational curative strategy to prevent and cure liver diseases involving oxidative stress. Although conclusions drawn from clinical studies remain uncertain, animal studies have revealed the promising in vivo therapeutic effect of antioxidants on liver diseases. Natural antioxidants contained in edible or medicinal plants often possess strong antioxidant and free radical scavenging abilities as well as anti-inflammatory action, which are also supposed to be the basis of other bioactivities and health benefits. In this review, PubMed was extensively searched for literature research. The keywords for searching oxidative stress were free radicals, reactive oxygen, nitrogen species, anti-oxidative therapy, Chinese medicines, natural products, antioxidants and liver diseases. The literature, including ours, with studies on oxidative stress and anti-oxidative therapy in liver diseases were the focus. Various factors that cause oxidative stress in liver and effects of antioxidants in the prevention and treatment of liver diseases were summarized, questioned, and discussed.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Pathology and Forensic Medicine, Pharmacology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8829d72f708553998a1ef5ec74a3d7b8c51e3782

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1. Dong-ping Xu
2. Ya Li
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4. Tong Zhou
5. Huabin Li
6. Yue Zhou
7. Jie Zheng
8. Jiao-Jiao Zhang

Citations in the corpus

• Natural Antioxidants in Foods and Medicinal Plants: Extraction, Assessment and Resources (2017, background): “Nonetheless, the exposure of cigarette smoking, alcohol, radiation, or environmental toxins induces the production of excessive ROS and RNS, which disrupt the balance between oxidation and anti-oxidation and result in some chronic and degenerative diseases [3–5].”