Shamsi-Baghbanan Hamid, Sharifian Afsaneh, Esmaeili Somayeh, Minaei Bagher
School of Traditional Medicine, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, IR Iran.
Basic and Molecular Epidemiology of Gastrointestinal Disorders Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, IR Iran.
Iran Red Crescent Med J. 2014 Jan;16(1):e12313. doi: 10.5812/ircmj.12313. Epub 2014 Jan 5.
Liver injury or dysfunction is considered as a serious health problem. The available synthetic drugs to treat liver disorders are expensive and cause further damage. Hence, hepatoprotective effects of some herbal drugs have been investigated, and one of the methods to choose herbs in order to study their biological effects is to search in ancient medical texts. Avicenna who is known as the prince of physicians had collected and classified Greek, Persian and Islamic medicine in the best possible way in the book of Canon in Arabic.
Avicenna's book of The Canon of Medicine was reviewed to find the hepatoprotective herbs.
Three different versions of the Canon were prepared and utilized. To find scientific names of plants we took advantage of three botany references. All of the herbs were investigated on the basis of scientific data from hepatoprotective effects point of view. The searched term was "hepatoprotective" without narrowing and limiting. The searched databases included Cochrane library, Web of science, SID, Irandoc and IranMedex.
18 plants were found. 85% of the presented species, genus or families of plants were reported to have hepatoprotective properties and in the remaining 15% there were no reports of hepatoprotective effect. Flowers and fruits were the most used part of the plants. Most of the plants had simultaneous protective effects on multiple organs but the protective effect on the liver was mostly accompanied by protective effect on the stomach (83%). The average temperament of these herbs is "hot" in the 2nd phase of the 2nd grade, and "dry" in the 3rd phase of the 2nd grade. Hepatoprotective herbs mostly prescribed as a part of hepatoprotective compound drugs formula or other formula for liver diseases are Crocus sativus, Pistacia lentiscus, and Cinnamomum spp.
Maybe there is common mechanism for protecting both liver and stomach. Aquilaria agallocha, Aquilaria malaccensis, and Ruscus aculeatus whose hepatoprotective effects have not yet been reported are considered as good candidates for future investigations. Given that Crocus sativus, and Cinnamomum spp are used as flavors in most countries, they will be introduced for more investigation in order to produce hepatoprotective drugs.
肝损伤或功能障碍被视为严重的健康问题。现有的用于治疗肝脏疾病的合成药物价格昂贵且会造成进一步损害。因此，人们对一些草药的保肝作用进行了研究，而选择草药以研究其生物学效应的方法之一是查阅古代医学文献。被誉为“医中之王”的阿维森纳在其阿拉伯语著作《医典》中尽可能完善地收集并整理了希腊、波斯和伊斯兰医学。
对阿维森纳的《医典》进行综述，以找出具有保肝作用的草药。
准备并使用了三个不同版本的《医典》。为确定植物的学名，我们参考了三本植物学参考文献。所有草药均从保肝作用的科学数据角度进行研究。搜索词为“保肝”，未作限定。搜索的数据库包括考克兰图书馆、科学网、伊朗科学信息数据库、伊朗文献数据库和伊朗医学数据库。
共找到18种植物。所列出的植物物种、属或科中，85%被报道具有保肝特性，其余15%未发现有保肝作用的报道。花和果实是这些植物最常使用的部位。大多数植物对多个器官具有同时保护作用，但对肝脏的保护作用大多伴随着对胃的保护作用（83%）。这些草药的平均药性在二级的第二阶段为“热”，在二级的第三阶段为“干”。作为保肝复方药物配方或其他肝病配方的一部分，最常被使用的保肝草药有藏红花、乳香黄连木和樟属植物。
肝脏和胃的保护可能存在共同机制。沉香、马来沉香和刺叶假叶树的保肝作用尚未见报道，被认为是未来研究的良好候选对象。鉴于藏红花和樟属植物在大多数国家被用作香料，将对其进行更多研究以生产保肝药物。
