Studies on treatment of fatty liver with traditional Chinese medicine

Great progress has been made in the study of fatty liver with integrated traditional Chinese and western medicine in aspects of diagnosis, treatment and experimental study, etc. Most researches were designed to utilize diagnostic or model replicating method of western medicine to observe the effects or investigate the action mechanism of compound recipe, single Chinese herb or effective ingredients of Chinese herbs on fatty liver. According to the pathological mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), fatty liver is characterized by deficiency in nature and repletion in appearance, which involves three Zang viscera such as liver, spleen and kidney and manifests as spleen Qi deficiency, liver and kidney deficiency, phlegm and dampness heaping internally, and Qi stagnation and blood stasis. This facilitates us to use specific recipe or modified recipe to treat fatty liver from the points of integrated traditional Chinese and western medicine and combining syndrome differentiation with disease differentiation. With gratifying achievement, this kind of approach has been the mainstream of the research on fatty liver and many researchers have reached an agreement on this point domestically. Spleen Fortifying and Blood Invigorating Recipe (SFBVER in brief, invented by our institute) can significantly improve the B ultrasound outcome of the liver in patients with fatty liver, with significant difference in B ultrasound scoring between pre-and post-treatment. It can alleviate the patients' symptoms, improve or regain liver function, decrease waist/buttocks ratio and the content of triglyceride and cholesterol in blood. SFBVER is superior to Dongbao Gantai Recipe in general effective rate. Experimental study also reveals that SFBVER can alleviate CCl(4) induced liver cell fatty degeneration and the inflammatory cell infiltration in rats, decrease the activities of ALT and AST, lower the content of triglyceride in liver, recover SOD activity in liver to normal level. The overall efficacy of SFBVER is superior to that of Dongbao Gantai Recipe. Further correlated study should be focused on inventing new preparation of traditional Chinese medicine and investigating its action mechanism with the guiding of the theory of TCM and referring to the latest discovery in fatty liver research in modern medicine.