Research Progress on the Alleviation of Alcoholic Liver Injury Based on Bibliometric Analysis of Medicinal and Food Homologous Substances

Objective: This paper analyze the research status and hot contents in the field related to alleviating alcoholic liver injury by medicinal and food homologous substances, and provided ideas for researchers to further in-depth study their alleviation effects on alcoholic liver injury. Methods: By using the bibliometric method, the CNKI, WOS and PubMed databases as the literatures source, the distribution of literatures in the field of alleviating alcoholic liver injury from the establishment of the library to 2022 were searched and analyzed. Results: A total of 418 Chinese and English literature and 276 patents on alleviating alcoholic liver injury with drugs and food homologous substances were obtained. Domestic research in this field started late, but its development speed was fast, and the number of domestic publications and patents were higher than that of foreign countries. The trends in the number of publications and patents showed exponential and linear increase, respectively. The research hotspots mainly focused on the effect mechanism of Kudzu, Hovenia dulcis Thunb., Goji berry and other medicinal and food homologous substances in alleviating alcoholic liver injury. Conclusion: By analyzing the research status of the literature and patent, the pathogenesis of alcoholic liver injury was systematically summary, mainly relate to the ethanol metabolism, oxidative stress, immune inflammatory response and impaired intestinal barrier and dysbacteriosis. The influencing mechanism of medicinal and food homologous substances in alleviating alcoholic liver injury was mainly related to anti-lipid peroxidation, oxidative stress response, anti-inflammatory effect, scavenging of free radicals, and regulation of intestinal flora. In the future, this field would be further studied in the mechanism by network pharmacology, histological techniques and other methods.