Natural diabetes treatments

Diabetes is characterized by the malfunction or death of insulin-producing pancreaticβ cells, which can lead to insulin deficiency and poorly regulated blood sugar levels. Two research groups have now shown that natural products can prevent this cellular disruption. Their findings could lead to the development of diabetes remedies. One group reports that gardenia fruit extract, a traditional Chinese medicine used to treat the disease, contains a compound that reverses the dysfunction ofβ cells in pancreatic tissue from mice. Bradford B. Lowell of Harvard Medical School, Chen-Yu Zhang of Harvard Medical School and Nanjing University, in China, and colleagues identified genipin (shown) as the active compound in the medicine (Cell Metab. 2006, 3, 417). Another team studied the suspected link between female sex steroids and the lower prevalence of diabetes in females. Franck Mauvais-Jarvis of Baylor College of Medicine and coworkers found that estradiol, the main estrogen compound in humans, protects β cells from damage and prevents diabetes in mice of both sexes (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, published online, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0602956103).