Hepatoprotective Potential of Herbal Bioactive Components: Phytochemistry, Mechanism, and Therapeutic Insights

Abstract

Liver disease has become one of the biggest health issues in the world with millions of deaths every year and it has been a big burden to the healthcare system around the world. Its rising tide is strongly associated with alcohol abuse, chronic drug use, industrial and environmental chemicals, viral diseases, and metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes. Despite their extensive prescribing, synthetic hepatoprotective drugs have limitations to clinical use because of their adverse effects, high toxicity potential, inconsistent therapeutic efficacy, and scarce liver regeneration capability. These limitations have increased scientific focus on natural hepatoprotective agents that are more effective and safer, i.e., plant-based agents. The herbal bioactive compounds like flavonoids, alkaloids, phenolic acids, terpenoids, and saponins have a broad range of pharmacological effects such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-fibrotic, immunomodulatory, and cytoprotective effects. These compounds help to restore liver architecture, increase detoxification pathways, and reduce oxidative stress, as well as normalize liver enzymes and biomarkers. Herbal agents have better safety profiles and better patient tolerability compared to most synthetic drugs. Nevertheless, even though there are encouraging preclinical and clinical results, there are still considerable gaps in the understanding of their molecular mechanisms of action, bioavailability, pharmacokinetic, and long-term clinical effect. This is a systematic review of the available evidence on both clinical trials and experimental studies covering 13 significant natural products such as Liv 52, probiotics, phospholipids, vitamin D, artichoke, berberine, and turmeric. It discusses their botanical, active constituents, therapeutic uses, and mechanisms of hepatoprotection in liver diseases like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), hepatitis, alcoholic liver disease and drug induced hepatotoxicity. Moreover, this review also provides a critical evaluation of the quality of the available data and emphasizes the immediate necessity of standardized dosing, strict toxicity testing, and extensive randomized clinical trials to make the most of the therapeutic potential of herbal medicines in the management of liver diseases.