Citation:
Abstract:
In the last decade, the number of diabetic persons has considerably increased and the scientific community approach to understand this complex pathology has become very difficult due to the fact that diabetes is linked to other illnesses which can generate serious complications like glaucoma, nerve damage. Plants are considered new alternative resources to treat various pathologies including type 2 diabetes, and several research works showed that it is significantly more accurate to use Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT) when diagnosing diabetes which prompted us to adopt this model to evaluate the possible anti-hyperglycemic effect of n-BuOH extract of Centaurea tougourensis. More than 500 Centaurea species are distributed in Mediterranean and West Asia zones. These species demonstrated over the years their pharmacological potential like antioxidant, anti-microbial, anti-diabetic, cytotoxic, activities due to their richness in secondary metabolites. A Preliminary phytoscreening was first done to identify the most important secondary metabolites in the plant and revealed the presence of key classes like; tannins, flavonoids, triterpenes… The pre-treatment of mice group by the dose of (400 ml/kg, p.o) of plant extract resulted in a significant (P<0.01) decrease of hyperglycemia (1.32 ± 0.06 g/l) 60 min after the induction of a temporary diabetes with a maximum percentage inhibition of (37%) while the reference group treated by Glibenclamide (10 mg/kg, i.p.) was only (31%) the same time. This concluded that C. tougourensis stabilized the blood glucose level and may have the potential to treat other pathologies.