Diabetes has become common lifestyle disorder associated with obesity and cardiovascular diseases. Environmental factors like physical inactivity, polluted surroundings and unhealthy dieting also plays a vital role in diabetes pathogenesis. As the current anti-diabetic drugs possess unprecedented side effects, traditional herbal medicine can be used an alternative therapy. The paramount challenge with the herbal formulation usage is the lack of standardized procedure, entangled with little knowledge on drug safety and mechanism of drug action. Heavy metal contamination is a major environmental hazard where plants tend to accumulate toxic metals like nickel, chromium and lead through industrial and agricultural activities. It becomes inappropriate to use these plants for phytotherapy as it may affect the human health on long term consumption. This review discuss about the environmental risk factors related to diabetes and better implication of medicinal plants in anti-diabetic therapy using network pharmacology. It is an in silico analytical tool that helps to unravel the multi-targeted action of herbal formulations rich in secondary metabolites. Also, a special focus is attempted to pool the databases regarding the medicinal plants for diabetes and associated diseases, their bioactive compounds, possible diabetic targets, drug-target interaction and toxicology reports that may open an aisle in safer, effective and toxicity-free drug discovery.
Keywords: Databases; Diabetes mellitus; Environmental factors; Natural products; Network pharmacology.
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