Is carnosine effective to alleviate lung injury: a systematic review

Abstract

Abstract Objectives Lung injury is one of the most important risk factor for morbidity and mortality, especially in older people. There are several reasons causing acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) such as pneumonia, sepsis, viruses, oxidants, and trauma. Evidence has shown that carnosine has many properties, such as suppressing hydroxyl, superoxide, and peroxyl radicals, inhibiting peroxidation, membrane protection and wound healing. We aimed to analyze the effects of carnosine on lung injury in this systematic review. Content A systematic research was performed in Pubmed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases for following keywords; “carnosine” AND “lungd” until October 31st, 2020. Bias analysis was done with RevMan 5.3 software. Summary We screened totally 51 publications and only nine articles were used for the final analysis. Eight animal studies and one in vitro study were included in this study. All studies indicated that carnosine has beneficial effects on improving lung injury. Outlook The study demonstrates that carnosine may be a promising new therapeutic agent and help to improve lung injury by reducing oxidative stress, proinflammatory cytokines, and apoptosis. Further investigations are needed to elucidate which mechanism is more effective to cure lung damage, especially in humans.