The antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antiapoptotic effects of wolfberry in fatty liver disease

The liver is one of the most important solid organs in the human body, which is responsible for a spectrum of key physiological processes, including protein synthesis, detoxification, nutrient storage, and innate/adaptive immunity regulation. Acute and chronic liver diseases greatly threaten the healthy condition of the liver organ. Alternative medicinal therapy, using extracts from natural herbs, provides a promising way to treat and prevent various liver diseases in past decades. Wolfberry has been proposed as a liver-nourishing recipe in the traditional Chinese medicine for more than 1000 years. Modern preclinical studies and clinical trials also suggest their beneficial effects on the liver. The hepatic protective properties of wolfberry may be mainly attributed to its polysaccharides portion, which have demonstrated to ameliorate hepatic injuries caused by both acute and chronic liver diseases, through mechanisms at different cascading levels of cell signaling pathways. In this chapter, we mainly focus on the etiology of fatty liver diseases and the protective mechanisms of wolfberry on the pathogenesis of chronic liver diseases.