REVIEW article

Front. Endocrinol.

Sec. Reproduction

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fendo.2025.1571021

This article is part of the Research TopicOvarian Aging: Pathophysiology and Recent Development of Maintaining Ovarian Reserve, Volume IVView all 6 articles

Non-hormone replacement therapy to overcome premature ovarian insufficiency: Advances in natural products and stem cells targeting autophagy

Provisionally accepted
Xinxin YangXinxin Yang1Zhicheng JiaZhicheng Jia2Mengyv ShiMengyv Shi1Yongqian LiYongqian Li1Guangheng ZhangGuangheng Zhang1Peixuan WangPeixuan Wang1Xinwei SunXinwei Sun1Wenlong QinWenlong Qin1Ying GuoYing Guo1,3*
  • 1Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan, China
  • 2China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
  • 3Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan, Shandong Province, China

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Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is the most common cause of female infertility. With the increase in people's bad life habits, the causative factors of POI have increased, and its incidence has shown a rising trend year by year. At present, the commonly used clinical treatment for POI is hormonal replacement therapy (HRT), which uses hormones (mainly estrogen) to mimic estrogen in women of childbearing age with normal ovarian function (Verrilli, 2023), but the clinical application of HRT is not universally applicable and is prone to cause subsequent complications, posing certain health risks to patients with POI. Therefore, exploring greener, safer, and more efficacious non-hormonal treatments can help to address the clinical challenges of POI-induced infertility better. Studies have shown that autophagy plays a key role in the development and degeneration of oocytes from their origin to the follicle and that any alteration in autophagy affects the ovarian reserve in the follicle and oocyte development (Kumariya et al., 2021). Moreover, certain natural products and human stem cells from different sources can treat POI by modulating the autophagic pathway and have shown good efficacy. Therefore, our study aimed to review and analyze the previous research-based literature on natural product and stem cell therapy based on the autophagy mechanism of POI, and provide new insights and references for related scholars to continue to explore the autophagy mechanism of POI and non-hormone-targeted therapeutic strategies in depth.

Keywords: PREMATURE OVARIAN INSUFFICIENCY, Autophagy, Molecular mechanisms, Nonhormonal therapy, Natural Products, Stem Cells

Received: 04 Feb 2025; Accepted: 07 May 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Yang, Jia, Shi, Li, Zhang, Wang, Sun, Qin and Guo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Ying Guo, Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan, 250011, Shandong Province, China

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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