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Published online: 9 April 2008 | Corrected online: 10 April 2008 | doi:10.1038/nchina.2008.78
Diabetes: A bittersweet treatment
Felix Cheung
Abstract
Active compounds found in bitter melon have potential to treat diabetes
Original article citation
et al. Antidiabetic activities of triterpenoids isolated from bitter melon associated with activation of the AMPK pathway. Chem. Biol. 15, 263–273 (2008).Introduction
© (2008) istockphoto.com/Jovan Nikolic
It seems like your mum was right. A study led by Yang Ye at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China, and David Ernest James at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia1, has shown that eating bitter melon really is good for you.
Bitter melon is an ingredient often used in Chinese cooking, and this unique bitter-tasting fruit is slowly being introduced in the West. For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine has been using the 'neutral and extremely cooling' bitter melon as a medicinal herb to treat different types of 'heat fatigue'. Several clinical studies have shown that bitter melon exerts hypoglycaemic effects on humans, which can serve as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, but until now the precise active compounds responsible for these effects have not been clearly identified.
Ye, James and co-workers have extracted a number of compounds from bitter melon and determined these compounds' structures and absolute configurations. They tested these compounds in vitro on muscle and fat cells, and found four compounds that could stimulate an increase in glucose entry into cells by a factor of three to four — comparable to the optimum response achieved by insulin. Further study revealed that these compounds activate AMPK, the protein responsible for regulating fuel metabolism and enabling glucose uptake — processes that are impaired in diabetics.
Of these four compounds, the researchers tested two in vivo on mice fed on a high-fat-content diet. They found a significant improvement in the glucose tolerance in these animals.
* Corrected: The reference of this highlight was changed.The authors of this work are from:
State Key Laboratory of Drug Research, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China; Diabetes and Obesity Research Program, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Bayer Industry Services, Leverkusen, Germany; Bayer CropScience, R & D, Agricultural Center, Monheim, Germany.
Reference
- Tan, M. J. et al. Antidiabetic activities of triterpenoids isolated from bitter melon associated with activation of the AMPK pathway. Chem. Biol. 15, 263–273 (2008).
