Chinese Herbs Could Reduce Diabetes

Scientists have found that emodin, a natural product that can be found in several Chinese herbs like Rheum palmatum and Polygonum cuspidatum (actually called Japanese Knotweed, or fleeceflower), can be a type 2 diabetes impact reduction agent.

Administrating emodin to mice with diet-induced obesity, had the positive effect of lowering serum insulin and blood glucose, it strengthened insulin resistance, it managed to bring lipids in the blood to a more healthy level and it also lowered central fat mass and body weight.

Several studies kept finding that the 11β-HSD1 enzyme has a very important role in the way the body responds to sugar within someone's diet.

The process goes as follows: when an individual eats food that contains sugar, a large quantity of glucose floods into the blood stream, and in response, the body releases insulin that helps clear the excess glucose from the blood.

Besides the insulin hormone, the body also has glucocorticoids; their effect is the opposite of insulin and that's when 11β-HSD1 becomes important as this enzyme increases their ability to act.

The researchers working on this latest research found out for the first time, that emodin is a possible inhibitor of 11β-HSD1, and by limiting the glucocorticoids' action, it ameliorates insulin resistance and diabetes.

Lead author Dr Ying Leng, who works in the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Science, Shanghai, China said that “if repeated in humans, all of these changes would be beneficial for people affected by type 2 diabetes or other metabolic diseases associated with insulin resistance.”

“Our work showed that this natural extract from Chinese herbs could point the way to a new way of helping people with type 2 diabetes as well as other metabolic disorders. To develop it further, researchers would need to develop chemicals that have similar effects as emodin, and see which if any of these could be used as a therapeutic drug,” adds Dr Leng.

These new findings were published in this month’s edition of the British Journal of Pharmacology, AlphaGalileo reports.