Therapeutic mechanism exploration of polysaccharides from Dendrobium officinale on unilateral ureteral obstruction operation-induced renal fibrosis based on improving oxidative stress injury mediated by AhR/NOX4 pathway

Dendrobium officinale polysaccharides (DOP) has been reported to possess remarkable effects on improving renal function, oxidative stress damage and fibrotic diseases. However, the role and mechanism of DOP in preventing and treating renal fibrosis remain unclear. The purpose of this paper was to explore the therapeutic effects and underlying mechanisms of DOP on renal fibrosis. Firstly, renal fibrosis model was induced by unilateral ureteral obstruction operation (UUO) in male BALB/c mice. Subsequently, the anti-renal fibrosis effect of DOP was evaluated. It turned out that DOP significantly attenuated UUO induced renal fibrosis. The beneficial effects of DOP on renal fibrosis were concretely manifested in the relief of clinical symptoms, improvement of renal function, reduction of extracellular matrix collagen aggregation, attenuation of structural damage and inflammation, and decrement of profibrotic factors secretion. Meanwhile, DOP could also alleviate oxidative stress injury and inhibit the AhR/NOX4 pathway proteins expression. Furthermore, multivariate statistical analysis, AhR interference and overexpression experiments showed that the effect of DOP on alleviating renal fibrosis was closely related to the improvement of oxidative stress injury mediated by the AhR/NOX4 pathway. Overall, the data in the present paper indicated that DOP could alleviate renal fibrosis through improving AhR/NOX4 mediated oxidative stress injury.