What is it about?
Plants contain various secondary metabolites possessing medicinal utility. Researchers are exploring this wealth and trying to decode its utility for enhancing health standards of human beings. Diabetes is dreadful lifestyle disorder of 21st century caused due to lack of insulin production or insulin physiological unresponsiveness. The chronic impact of untreated diabetes significantly affects vital organs. The allopathic medicines might not be absolute in treatment and moreover may present certain adverse drug reactions / organ toxicity . In addition, diet management, increased food fiber intake, resistant starch intake and routine exercise aid in managing such dangerous metabolic disorder. Alternatively, Natural Plant Products can also be used for imparting complementary therapies. One of the key factors that limit commercial utility of herbal drugs is standardization. Standardization poses numerous challenges related to marker identification, active principle(s), lack of defined regulations, non-availability of universally acceptable technical standards for testing and implementation of quality control / safety standard (toxicological testing). Such quality control processes have to be stringently followed for effective drug development. Therapeutic herbal leads for controlling Diabetes have been discussed in this paper. Furthermore, Herbal drug standardization process has also been well elucidated.
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Why is it important?
The present study proposed an integrated herbal drug development & standardization model which is an amalgamation of Classical Approach of Ayurvedic Therapeutics , Reverse Pharmacological Approach based on Observational Therapeutics, Technical Standards for complete product cycle, Chemi-informatics, Herbal Qualitative Structure Activity Relationship and Pharmacophore modeling and, Post-Launch Market Analysis.
Perspectives
Herbal Drugs are not universally accepted, despite of the fact that an antibiotic apocalypse era has just commenced. One reason behind the lag in herbal drug development could be the lack of any standard protocol for herbal drug standardization. This paper definitely provides an overview of herbal drug standardization approaches. Secondly, this paper provides atleast 10 potential leads targeting the most dreadful lifestyle disorder of the decade i.e., Diabetes. All these leads have been exclusively scrutinized on the basis of ethnopharmacology and experimental evidences. These leads can henceforth be utilized for further in vitro and in vivo analyses.
Ms Pallavi Thakur
Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Allied Sciences, Defence Research and Development Organisation
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evidence based herbal drug standardization approach in coping with challenges of holistic management of diabetes: a dreadful lifestyle disorder of 21st century, Journal of Diabetes & Metabolic Disorders, January 2013, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1186/2251-6581-12-35.
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