Asfaw Meresa, Worku Gemechu, Hirut Basha, Netsanet Fekadu, Firehiwot Teka, Rekik Ashebir and Ashenif Tadele
Background: Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a serious metabolic disorder which causes blood glucose to rise in blood streams abnormally emanating from the difficulty in insulin secretion, its action or the two. The absence of effective modern treatments, the lifelong treatment with modern medicine their associated health side effects and their expensive prices etc. are among the challenging existing realities which devastate/worsen the health and economic burdens of the disease, especially in developing nations. In light of these, the search for cheaper, safe and potential drugs from medicinal plants is very crucial.
Objective: The aim of this review is to document existing information on Ethiopian and Eretrian medicinal plants used to treat DM from various sources.
The following documents (published scientific papers, MSc thesis, books and research reports on ethno-botany as well as different on-line sources) using the search words, diabetics, medicinal plants and ethno botanical studies, are used in order to compile this review article.
One hundred five plant species claiming to have anti-diabetic activity were reported in this study. Moringa stenoptela, Allium sativum, Caylusea abyssinica, Ajuga remota, Calpurnia aurea, and Psidium guajava are among them which are the most frequently mentioned medicinal plant species. Only few numbers of medicinal plants were scientifically evaluated for their anti-diabetic effects in animal models in the countries, whereas the majority of them are not yet evaluated. Next to leaf, root is the second most frequently employed part in the anti-diabetic herbal preparations.
Conclusion: The prevalence of diabetes mellitus carries on escalating all over the World and no effective treatments that can manage diabetes have ever been discovered till present. Medication with commercial oral hypoglycemic drugs is getting very difficult due their expensive costs and associated adverse side effects on the health of the patient. Hence, the search for effective and safe drugs from the available medicinal plants should be consolidated in order to alleviate the above mentioned problems. Moreover, the indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants has to be documented in order to initiate or motivate interested researchers to find out anti-diabetic promising candidate drug from folk medicine that might cure or manage the cases and enable self-reliance in the future.
