Abstract
Milk thistle dietary supplements that contain silymarin are widely marketed and used in the USA and other countries for liver enhancement and recovery. More recently, silymarin has also been identified as a possible antiviral for the treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. To assess different brands of commercially sold silymarin, 45 products were collected from local stores and analyzed for their silymarin content, antioxidant activities, and antiviral activity against HCV. Antioxidant activity was measured as radical scavenging activity using DPPH and by estimating their antioxidant capacity as trolox equivalent. Anti-HCV activity was measured in an HCV genotype 1b replication inhibition assay. Samples were found to vary widely in their silymarin content, with some samples having none or very low concentrations while silymarin represented higher than 80% of other samples. Both antioxidant and anti-HCV activity correlated with the overall level of silymarin.
Highlights
Over-the-counter nutritional or dietary supplements are becoming extremely popular in the UnitedStates, Europe and many other countries
Extraction, manufacturing, and quantification techniques used for generating commercially available for the treatment of chronic liver diseases is unregulated, it is difficult to directly compare different commercial sources of milk thistle and interpret the many studies that have reported various levels of biological activities
We sought to compare the actual content of silymarin among 45 different milk thistle products
Summary
Over-the-counter nutritional or dietary supplements are becoming extremely popular in the United. The reason we undertook the current study is that complexity of the silymarin product combined with its unregulated manufacturing process has made it difficult to judge the role of silymarin in the treatment of chronic liver diseases. This has been further compounded by the poor documentation of the ingredients in these products, the source of the silymarin or the specific extraction processes used. In the absence of specific criteria or guidelines for the judging the quality of silymarin extracts, it has been difficult to interpret the majority of previous clinical efficacy studies, reconcile what may seem to be conflicting results among different studies or determine the individual active components [23,24]. Was used to empirically determine in parallel the total amounts of silymarin, likewise, antioxidant and anti-HCV activities were measured side-by-side in standardized assays
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