The concentrated broccoli outbreak extract can help patients with type 2 diabetes to control their blood sugar, according to a new study.
The research results could offer a very necessary alternative to address the disease, which has become a world epidemic.
Type 2 diabetes affects more than 300 million people worldwide and up to 15 percent of patients cannot take the metformin first -line drug due to renal damage risks.
Looking for a more viable path, Annika Axelsson, from the Diabetes Center of the University of Lund, in Malmö, Sweden, and his colleagues used a computational approach to identify compounds that could counteract the changes of gene expression associated with type 2 diabetes.
The researchers built a firm for type 2 diabetes based on 50 genes and used publicly available expression data sets to analyze 3,852 drug compounds that could potentially reverse the disease.
The most promising chemical compound - sulforafano, a natural compound found in cruciferous vegetables - cushioned glucose production by liver cells that grow in culture and displaced the gene expression of the liver away from a sick state in diabetic rats.
When scientists gave concentrated broccoli extracts to 97 patients with type 2 diabetes in a 12 -week placebo controlled trial, obese participants who entered the study with poorly regulated disease demonstrated blood glucose levels in fasting significantly lower than controls.
The authors say that developing genetic firms to investigate large public deposits of gene expression data could be a valuable strategy to quickly identify clinically relevant compounds.