Suh-Ching Yang, Director of School of Nutrition and Health Sciences, honored with Outstanding Nutrition Academic Research Award

She has dedicated herself to studying the preventive effects/mechanisms on alcohol-associated liver damage by health-promoting ingredients found in nutrients and natural foods. Her research began by studying liver damage caused by alcohol consumption and gradually expanded to explore correlations between liver damage and damage to other organs.

Antioxidant nutrients and alcohol-associated liver diseases: Oxidative stress is one of the main pathogenic mechanisms of alcohol-associated liver diseases. It is caused by the large amount of reactive oxygen species produced when the liver metabolizes alcohol with the CYP2E1 detoxification system. Professor Yang tested the effect of the antioxidative nutrient β-carotene on alleviating oxidative stress resulting from metabolization of alcohol, and investigated oxidative stress in patients with alcohol-associated liver diseases. Her results confirmed that some patients with alcohol-associated liver diseases have increased lipid peroxide concentrations and reduced antioxidative capacity.

Fats/oils and alcohol-associated liver diseases: There is a notion that saturated fats/oils can reduce alcohol-associated liver damage, while unsaturated fats/oils accelerate the formation of alcohol-associated liver diseases. However, Professor Yang argues that it is impossible to consume only one kind of fat/oil in one’s diet. Therefore, she adjusted the proportion of fish oil in animal feeds, to study the correlation between fish oil and alcohol-associated liver damage. This study included evaluating the mechanisms of action for improvement effects, providing a comprehensive demonstration of the preventive effects on alcohol-associated liver damage.

Intestinal health, muscle loss, brain damage, and alcohol-associated liver diseases: Professor Yang has investigated the correlation between intestinal health and alcohol-associated liver damage, publishing several articles reporting her findings on intestinal health-promoting factors and alcohol-associated liver diseases. She has also explored issues such as muscle loss (the liver-muscle axis) and brain damage (the liver-brain axis) induced by alcohol-associated liver diseases.

Lung damage and alcohol-associated liver diseases: Studies during the COVID-19 era have discovered that people with alcohol use disorder are a group at risk for developing severe COVID-19 symptoms. Professor Yang expanded her research to investigate correlations between alcohol-associated liver diseases and lung damage, in hopes of completing her liver-lung axis study.

“Using the lipid metabolism-regulating, antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, and intestinal health-maintaining functions of nutrients and pathogenic mechanisms to prevent various alcohol-associated liver diseases”