Pien Tze Huang, a 500-Year-Old Traditional Composite Medicine in China for Liver Ailments Alleviates Some Effects of the Alcoholic Liver in a Mouse Model

The liver reacted to alcohol intoxication in several stages, from fatty degeneration, inflammation, cell death to finally fibrosis.Pien Tze Huang (PTH) is a composite Chinese medicine that has been used for liver ailments until this day.Despite many reported its beneficial effects on various diseases (e.g., cancers, ischemic brain and encephalitis), there are few studies on whether PTH can attenuate alcohol induced liver ailments as an alternative therapy.Therefore, this study aims to investigate if PTH possesseshepatoprotective effect against alcoholism.ICR mice were divided into four groups.Alcohol group was treated with alcohol.PTH pretreatment group was treated with PTH before alcohol treatment.Rotation treatment group received PTH and alcohol treatment alternately.Control group was treated with saline.Liver histopathology was observed via hematoxylin and eosin stain and Sirius red stain.Proliferation and necrosis in liver tissue were demonstrated by immunohistochemistry (IHC) targeting proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) respectively.Apoptosis was evaluated by terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL).Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF) and interleukin 4 (IL-4) in liver tissue were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).In histopathology, both PTH pretreatment and rotational treatment prevented fibrosis.When compared with alcohol group, both PTH treatments decreased LDH-positive cells.PTH pretreatment could further increase PCNA-positive cells and decrease positive cells in TUNEL.In ELISA, both PTH treatments decreased liver TNF while PTH pretreatment increased liver IL-4.From our results, PTH could alleviate the alcohol effects as a complementary treatment.