Diabetes mellitus and multiple therapeutic approaches of phytochemicals: Present status and future prospects

Abstract

According to recent estimates, the human population worldwide appears to be in the midst of an epidemic of diabetes. Despite the great strides that have been made in the understanding and management of diabetes, the disease and disease-related complications are increasing unabated. Parallel to this, recent developments in understanding the pathophysiology of the disease process have opened up several new avenues to identify and develop novel therapies to combat the diabetic plague. Concurrently, phytochemicals identified from traditional medicinal plants are presenting an exciting opportunity for the development of new types of therapeutics. This has accelerated the global effort to harness and harvest those medicinal plants that bear substantial amount of potential phytochemicals showing multiple beneficial effects in combating diabetes and diabetes-related complications. Therefore, as the disease is progressing unabated, there is an urgent need of identifying indigenous natural resources in order to procure them, and study in detail, their potential on different newly identified targets in order to develop them as new therapeutics. This article presents an overview of multiple aspects of the pathobiology of diabetes mellitus and multimodal therapeutic effect of medicinal plants/phytochemicals and discusses the present status and future prospects of these medicines.