July 9, 2007
Pumpkin Extract May Help Treat Diabetes
May Help Protect Insulin-Making Cells From Type 1 Diabetes, Animal Tests Suggest
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(AP)
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The researchers studied rats. It's too soon to know if the findings apply to people.
Normally, people control blood sugar naturally through a hormone called insulin, which is made by certain cells in the pancreas.
But in type 1 diabetes, the body's immune system mistakenly attacks those pancreatic cells. That wrecks the insulin-making process, leaving blood sugar uncontrolled without insulin shots.
The Chinese study suggests that Asian pumpkin extract may help protect those pancreatic cells from the ravages of type 1 diabetes. The findings appear in July's Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.
Pumpkin Extract vs. Diabetes?
The researchers included Tao Xia, PhD, of East China Normal University in Shanghai, China.
First, the scientists bought whole, mature Asian pumpkins — popularly called shark fin melon or Siam pumpkin — at a Shanghai market. Those pumpkins don't look like the orange pumpkins common in the United States. Instead, they've got a green and white rind.
The researchers took the pumpkins back to their lab, removed the seeds, dried the fruit, and concocted a pumpkin extract.
Next, the researchers mixed the pumpkin extract with water and fed it to rats for a month. Some of the rats had type 1 diabetes; other rats weren't diabetic.
After a month of consuming the pumpkin extract daily, the diabetic rats lowered their high blood sugar. The pumpkin extract didn't affect the blood sugar of the rats that weren't diabetic.
The researchers also compared diabetic rats that ate the pumpkin extract for a month with diabetic rats that didn't get the pumpkin extract.
Healthy, insulin-making pancreatic cells were more abundant in the diabetic rats that ate the pumpkin extract than in the diabetic rats that never consumed the pumpkin extract.
The pumpkin extract may help save some, but not all, of those insulin-making pancreatic cells or revive diabetes-damaged pancreatic cells, according to the researchers.
The pumpkin extract didn't affect the insulin-making pancreatic cells of nondiabetic rats.
The study doesn't identify what chemical or chemicals in the pumpkin extract may have been responsible for the results. Antioxidants in pumpkin may have played a role, the scientists suggest.
- Pumpkin — it's not just for pie. What do you think about this study? Talk about it on the Type 1 Diabetes Support Group board.
By Miranda Hitti
Reviewed by Louise Chang
©2007 WebMD, Inc. All rights reserved.
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As a diabetic this is fascinatiing to me but i must say that I am wondering can anyone with Type 1 do this treatment? or did they only test n newly diganosed specimens?
This is interesting. After years of shots and the pump I could eat pumpkin if it would help.
Type two diabetics still produce insulin, but their cells are resistant to it. That is why many type two diabetics don't have to use injectable insulin, but can instead take oral medications that lower their insulin resistance. Type one diabetics have an auto-immune disease that destroys the Islets of Langerhans, cells in the pancreas that are responsible for producing insulin.