ABSTRACT
There are numerous plants used to treat diabetes in traditional medicine, which includes tribal and folk medicines practiced by various ethnic groups in remote villages and tribal pockets of the world. Varying levels of scientic studies have been done on less than a half of these plants. Out of these plants studied, most of them exhibited antidiabetic and/or hypoglycemic activities in in vitro and/or in vivo pharmacological investigations. There are two excellent sources available to get information on antidiabetic traditional medicinal plants. A detailed review on this subject was published in 1995 (Marles and Farnsworth 1995). After 10 years, updated information on traditional anti-diabetes mellitus (anti-DM) plants was published in a book chapter (Simmonds and Howes 2005). Now, another 10 years have passed. This period witnessed a rapid growth in the scientic validation of traditional medicinal plants and the emergence of new journals in this and related areas of study. There have been substantial amounts of new study reports on individual anti-DM plants and review papers on the pharmacological and phytochemical aspects of such plants. However, these reports are scattered, and the review papers on anti-DM plants are incomplete and required information is not available in one place for reference.
