OBJECTIVETo observe the regulation of Youguiyin (YGY, ) on the gene expression profile of the rat with steroid-induced femoral head necrosis (sFHN), for the sake of investigating its molecular mechanism of sFHN prevention and treatment.

METHODSAll the 30 rats were randomly divided into three groups, the normal control group (A), the model control group (B), and the YGY treated group (C), 10 in each group. After rats in Groups B and C were being made into FHN models with steroid injection, they received a daily intragastric administration of saline and YGY respectively in equal volume for a total of 6 weeks, while to the unmodeled normal rats in Group A, saline was administered instead. The rats were sacrificed at the terminal of administration; their mRNA from femoral head tissue was extracted and prepared to cDNA probe through inverse transcription for detecting gene expression profile by microarray, outcomes of which was passing fluorescence quantitative PCR verification, and the differential expressed genes were analyzed adopting gene ontology (GO) method.

RESULTSCompared with Group A, the numbers of differential genes found in Groups B and C were 190 and 92, respectively, but the changing trend in the two groups was opposite, mainly manifested as down-regulating in Group B/Group A (GB/GA) and up-regulating in Group C/Group B (GC/GB). The analysis showed that these differential genes were mainly assigned to cell apoptosis, signal transduction, metabolism, cell proliferation and differentiation, cell cycle, blood coagulation, antioxidant activity, etc.

CONCLUSIONSsFHN was regulated by various genes; the regulation of YGY on expressions of these genes and the intra/extra-cellular signaling processes was possibly the molecular mechanism of YGY for preventing/treating sFHN. This study gave an explanation to the effectiveness of Chinese medicine in preventing/treating FHN from aspects of gene expression and enriched the Chinese medicine theory of "Kidney (Shen) governing bones".