Garlic tablet treats diabetes types I and II
Posted by Jon on Wed 19 Nov 2008Categories: Medicine and Drugs , Metallomics , RSC journals | [2] Comments
Not good news for diabetic vampires, but for non-porphyric sufferers a potential new drug to treat both diabetes types I and II has been discovered.
Garlic: the saviour for diabetics?
The new drug, based on allixin, a compound found in garlic, can be administered orally – perhaps as a tablet – and effectively lowers the blood glucose level of type 1 diabetic mice, the study has found.
Type 1 diabetics currently stick to a daily regime of self-injection with insulin, whereas type 2 diabetics are treated with oral drugs, sometimes leading to undesirable side-effects.
This is a great story from the first round of Advance Articles from our new journal, Metallomics, the first issue of which will be published next year.
The article itself, by Hiromu Sakurai and colleagues at the Suzuka University of Medical Science, Japan, is available free here.
Personally I wonder if a garlic-based drug would give you bad breath… any other opinions on this?
Wed 25 Nov 2009 at 18:56
It would not give you garlic breath because the active ingredient, Allixin, is being extracted. Bad breath is caused by a sulfide called AMS, which, while found in garlic, would not serve any use in a pharmaceutical drug.
Sun 29 Nov 2009 at 22:20
The problem with mouse results is that they seem to respond positively to everything. And when these new miracle cures are tested on humn, most of them fail.
Juvenon is the best exmple. Mice got younger and smarter with this combination of alpha lipoic acid and L-carnitine. Hopes were hugely raised (and a ot of moey). But where is Juvenon now? Gone without a single retraction….