Liver disease or liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer and the third leading cause of cancer mortality in the world. Hepatitis viral infection, food additives, alcohol, fungal toxins (aflatoxins), toxic industrial chemicals, air and water pollutants are the major risk factors of liver cancer. Moreover, due to high tolerance of liver, HCC is seldom detected at an early stage and once detected treatment faces a poor prognosis in most cases.Fumaria indica possesses hepatoprotective activity as evidenced by the significant and dose dependent restoring the activities of entire liver cancer marker enzymes, diminution in tumor incidence, decrease in lipid peroxidation (LPO) and increase in the level of antioxidant enzymes (GSH, CAT, SOD, GPx and GST) through scavenging of free radicals, or by enhancing the activity of antioxidant, which then detoxify free radicals. These factors protect cells from ROS damage in NDEA and CCl4-induced hepatocarcinogenesis. Histopathological observations of liver tissues too correlated with the biochemical observations. Thus, present investigation suggested that the Fumaria indica would exert a chemoprotective effect by reversing the oxidant-antioxidant imbalance during hepatocarcinogenesis induced by NDEA and CCl4. Besides Fumaria indicais very much effective in preventing NDEA-induced multistage hepatocarcinogenesis possibly through antioxidant and antigenotoxic nature, which was confirmed by various liver injury and biochemical tumour markers enzymes. The hepatoprotective activity of a Fumaria indicaof 50 % ethanolic extract was studied using rats. The animals received a single intraperitoneal injection of N-nitrosodiethylamine 200mg/kg body wt followed by subcutaneous injection of CCl4 in a dose of 3 ml/kg body wt. Fumaria indica extract dose dependently and significantly the increase in serum hepatic enzyme levels after NDEAand CCl4 treatment compared to the toxin control group. The results of this study confirmed the antioxidant and hepatoprotective activity of the Fumaria indicaextract against carbon tetrachlorideand N-nitrosodiethylamine induced hepatotoxicity in rats. In addition to this, studies on molecular aspect of hepatoprotective therapy will give mechanistic information in hepatoprotective therapy and also critical balance should be there between the animal model and clinical research. The hepatoprotective properties of Fumaria indicashould provide useful information in the possible application in hepatic liver disease.
