Artesunate ameliorates non-alcoholic fatty liver disease cells by regulating the inflammatory cytokines and oxidative stress in vitro

Recently, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease has become the most common cause of chronic liver disease with the increasing prevalence of obesity, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome in the general population. Nevertheless, it still has no obvious treatment mechanism so far. Artesunate is the water soluble derivatives of artemisinin which shows high activity against both drug-resistant and drug-sensitive of malaria. In the present study, we employed artesunate to assess whether it could improve nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. The 20 mu g/mL oleic acid was employed as a treating reagent to induce steatosis, this was used for building a hepatocyte LO-2 nonalcoholic fatty liver disease cell model, which could mimic the histological features and pathological symptom. Therefore, this model was treated with different concentrations of artesunate. The total content of triglyceride (TG), alanine aminotransferase, aspartate amino transferase, alkaline phosphatase and tumor necrosis factor (TNF-alpha), interleukin-6 (IL6), interleukin-10 (IL-10) and interleukin-18 (IL-18) were determined by Elisa, and immunoflurescence and Western blot were employed for further confirmation. Optical microscopy, Western blot, Elisa technique, immunoflurescence and dichlorofluorescin diacetate (DCFH-DA) assays suggested that artesunate was able to improve nonalcoholic fatty liver disease by regulating the downstream inflammatory cytokines (TNF-alpha, IL-6, IL-8 and IL-18) and oxidative stress which were associated with TLR4/PI3K/Akt pathway. These results demonstrated that artesunate could be a potential therapeutic strategy for preventing the progression and development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease cells. This report is conductive to deepening the understanding of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease mechanism and provides theoretical basis for clinical application of artesunate in treating nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.