POTENT ANTI-DIABETIC ACTIVITY OF TRADITIONAL MEDICINAL PLANTS FROM JAMMU AND KASHMIR: A REVIEW

Diabetes is a serious human ailment which afflicts various walks of life and raises concerns of health care industry in recent time. Instead of the availability of multiple treatment regimes for managing diabetes, the complications associated with it are still costly to be managed by available drugs. Natural products have been established by extensive research efforts for their anti-diabetic properties and emerge as potential sources for discovering new drugs. The preference is given for developing herbal formulations due to low cost and lesser side effects. There is still a great demand for developing new drugs of plant origin with anti-diabetic activities, due to the lack of scientific validation for majority of plant derived potential anti-diabetic agents. India is a vast reserve and a home of many medicinal plants with proven antidiabetic properties. In India, the state of Jammu and Kashmir due to wide range of elevations and diverse biogeography produce high diversity of vegetation especially in terms of medicinal plant wealth. Medicinal plants like Berberis lyceum, Aegle marmelos, Artemisia sp, Allium sp, Tinospora cordifolia, Trigonella foenum, etc. are the cultivars of Jammu and Karshmir with proven antidiabetic properties. In this review article, we reviewed the published studies describing the medicinal plants from Jammu and Kashmir for improving diabetes and associated complications. The detailed action mechanisms of phyto-active constituents of these medicinal plants are also described. However, the scientific validation of plant origin anti-diabetic drugs is required through in vitro and in vivo studies for their commercial exploitation.