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Broccoli Sprouts Help In Treating Type 2 Diabetes

by Hannah Joy on Jun 15 2017 3:47 PM

Broccoli Sprouts Help In Treating Type 2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes patients can now manage their blood sugar levels with concentrated broccoli sprout extract, reveals a new study.
The findings could offer a much needed alternative to address the condition, which has become a worldwide epidemic.

Type 2 diabetes afflicts more than 300 million people globally, and as many as 15% of those patients cannot take the first-line therapy metformin because of kidney damage risks.

Seeking a more viable path forward, Annika Axelsson and colleagues used a computational approach to identify compounds that might counter the disease-associated gene expression changes associated with type 2 diabetes.

The researchers constructed a signature for type 2 diabetes based on 50 genes, then used publically available expression datasets to screen 3,852 compounds for drugs that potentially reverse disease.

The most promising chemical sulforaphane, a naturally occurring compound found in cruciferous vegetables tamped down glucose production by liver cells growing in culture, and shifted liver gene expression away from a diseased state in diabetic rats.

When the researchers gave concentrated broccoli sprout extracts to 97 human type 2 diabetes patients in a 12-week randomized placebo-controlled trial, obese participants who entered the study with dysregulated disease demonstrated significantly decreased fasting blood glucose levels compared to controls.

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The authors say developing gene signatures to investigate large public repositories of gene expression data could be a valuable strategy to rapidly identify clinically relevant compounds.



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Source-Eurekalert


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