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ABSTRACT
Introduction: Diabetic neuropathy (DN) is one of the major complications arising from hyperglycaemia in diabetic patients. In recent years polyphenols present in plants have gained attention to treat DN. The main advantages associated with them are their action via different molecular pathways to manage DN and their safety. However, they failed to gain clinical attention due to challenges associated with their formulation development such as lipophilicity,poor bioavailability, rapid systemic elimination, and enzymatic degradation.
Area covered: This article includes different polyphenols that have shown their potential against DN in preclinical studies and the research carried out towards development of their nanoformulations in order to overcome aforementioned issues.
Expert opinion: In this review various polyphenol based nanoformulations such as nanospheres, self-nanoemulsifying drug delivery systems, niosomes, electrospun nanofibers, metallic nanoparticles explored exclusively to treat DN are discussed. However, the literature available related to polyphenol based nanoformulations to treat DN is limited. Moreover, these experiments are limited to preclinical studies. Hence, more focus is required towards development of nanoformulations using simple and single step process as well as inexpensive and non-toxic excipients so that a stable, scalable, reproducible and non-toxic formulation could be achieved and clinical trials could be initiated.
Article highlights
Diabetic neuropathy is the most prevalent microvascular complication associated with diabetes mellitus
Polyphenols modulate all the pathological conditions observed in DN including neurodegeneration and oxidative stress.
Despite the discovery of so many polyphenols for treating DN, their therapeutic use is limited due to their inherent challenge of low aqueous solubility, poor absorption, poor bioavailability, rapid systemic elimination, and enzymatic degradation
Nanoformulations such as nanospheres, metallic nanoparticles, fullerenes, ceramic, polymeric NPs, SNEDDS and nanofibers have been reported to improve bioavailability, targeting, and therapeutic efficacy of polyphenols to treat DN
Reviewer disclosures
Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.
Declaration of interest
The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.