Is it really the ＂dark side＂ of herbal medicine？

Aristolochic acids (AAs), previously rarely mentioned compounds, have been brought into the public eye several times since the beginning of this century; and currently, they have drawn even greater attention due to their association with liver cancer, as was recently reported by Ng et al.(Ng et al., 2017). The authors sequenced the whole exomes of 98patients with hepatocellular carcinomas (HCC) from Taiwan and reported that 78%of the cases carried the AAs mutational signature, A:T>T:A transversion. Further examination of publicly available data from Chinese patients with

Aristolochic acids （AAs）, previously rarely mentioned compounds, have been brought into the public eye several times since the beginning of this century; and currently, they have drawn even greater attention due to their association with liver cancer, as was recently reported by Ng et al.（Ng et al., 2017）. The authors sequenced the whole exomes of 98patients with hepatocellular carcinomas （HCC） from Taiwan and reported that 78%of the cases carried the AAs mutational signature, A：T〉T：A transversion.