Experimental substantiation of the use of quercetin for the correction of functional disorders in diabetes mellitus 

Abstract

The diabetes mellitus is an acute medical and social problem demanding the search of different methods of carbohydrate metabolism correction. The literature data during the last years indicate that parallel with medical drugs the protective and medicinal effects could provide herbal preparations. To test the hypothesis of the effect of one of them – quercetin in different forms - on the carbohydrate metabolism this study has been done. It has been shown that the initial, adsorbed and encapsulated quercetin in a cellulose molecule had a pronounced effect on some parameters of carbohydrate, fat and protein metabolism in rats compared with animals that did not receive this bioflavonoid. The initial quercetin showed a distinct, but short-term, hypoglycemic effect already on the 1-st day of the study, while the surface-adsorbed and cellulose-encapsulated quercetin had a significant effect starting from the 5-th day, but this effect persisted throughout the observation. These hypoglycemic effects of quercetin partly due to the increase of glycogen in the liver and elevation of plasma corticosterone. The other possible mechanisms of quercetin effect on glucose concentration in plasma are proposed.