Loganin, a major chemical component of Corni Fructus, had the highest concentration in the medicated serum in this study, and exerts an early renal protective role in DN by inhibiting connective tissue growth factor (Jiang et al., 2012), and alleviating the loss of podocytes induced by high glucose via targeting AGEs-RAGE and its downstream pathways, p38MAPK and Nox4, in vivo or in vitro (Chen et al., 2020). The gene discussed is NOX4; the disease is liver dysplastic nodule.