Your liver has many important jobs such as changing food into energy and filtering toxins from your blood, which is why, when something goes wrong, it can be fatal. Serious liver diseases led to 112,000 hospitalizations and over 29,000 deaths in 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Milk thistle, an herb used in traditional medicine around the world since the time of the ancient Romans, shows promise as an effective supplement to prevent and treat liver disease.
Identification
Milk thistle is also known as St. Mary's thistle or by its scientific name, Silybum marianum. It's native to the Mediterranean and gets its name from the milky white fluid that is extracted from the leaves when they're crushed. The active ingredient in milk thistle that protects the liver is silymarin, a type of antioxidant that protects your body from cell-damaging free radicals. Most milk thistle supplements are standardized preparations made from the seeds of the plant and contain 70 to 80 percent silymarin.
Benefits
Silymarin may benefit your liver by protecting and promoting the growth of liver cells, inhibiting inflammation and fighting a chemical process known as oxidation that can damage cells. Silymarin also helps stabilize cell membranes and stimulate protein synthesis, which in turn accelerates regeneration of damaged liver tissue. Milk thistle extract further protects liver cells by blocking and removing harmful toxins, and it also helps decrease fatty deposits in the liver.
Cirrhosis
Cirrhosis is scarring of the liver and poor liver function that results from chronic liver disease, often caused by alcoholism. In one study, sixty patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis were randomized to receive either a placebo or 150 mg of silymarin daily for six months. The results, published in "International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics" in 2001, showed that the silymarin group had decreases in harmful lipid peroxidation and moderate increases in levels of glutathione, a naturally occurring antioxidant present in cells but seen in low levels in cirrhosis patients.
Hepatitis
A team in Denmark analyzed 18 different randomized clinical trials that had assessed milk thistle's effects on hepatitis in over 1,000 patients. The analysis was published in "Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews" in October 2007 and showed that milk thistle resulted in a 50 percent decrease in liver-related mortality. However, the researchers noted that only a little over a quarter of the trials reported high methodology in their study design and that adequately conducted and reported randomized clinical trials on milk thistle versus placebo are needed.
Liver Cancer
A report in "Cancer Letters" in 2008 indicated that a number of studies had established the cancer preventing and antimetastatic role of silymarin in both in vitro and animal tests. In a study published a year later in the journal "Cell Proliferation," researchers showed that silymarin treatment inhibited proliferation and induced cell death in the human liver cancer cell line HepG2.
References
- University of Maryland Medical Center; Milk Thistle; Steven D. Ehrlich; March 2009
- "Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews"; Milk Thistle for Alcoholic and/or Hepatitis B or C Virus Liver Diseases; A. Rambaldi et al.; October 2007
- "International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics"; Effects of Silymarin Mz-80 on Oxidative Stress in Patients with Alcoholic Cirrhosis; M.I. Lucena et al.; January 2001
- "Cancer Letters"; Multi-targeted Therapy of Cancer by Silymarin; Kumaraguruparan Ramasamy and Rajesh Agarwal; October 2008
- "Cell Proliferation"; Silymarin Inhibited Proliferation and Induced Apoptosis in Hepatic Cancer Cells; G. Ramakrishnan et al.; April 2009
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Chronic Liver Disease or Cirrhosis
