title: A study of the anti-diabetic agents of camel milk.
abstract: The number of people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes has risen steeply recently             exhausting the ability of health care systems to deal with the epidemic. Seventy-five             percent of people with diabetes live in low- and middle-income countries. The             largest populations of diabetics are in China and India, with many of those people             living in extreme poverty. Combined forces of governmental health care, charities             and donation of pharmaceutical companies would not be able to cope with the financial             demands needed for medicaments and treatments for these people. Therefore, it             is worth looking into traditional folk remedies to find if there is any scientific             merit to justify their claims for alleviating symptoms of diabetes. There is a             traditional belief in the Middle East that regular consumption of camel milk helps             in the prevention and control of diabetes. Recently, it has been reported that             camel milk can have such properties. Literature review suggests the following             possibilities: i) insulin in camel milk possesses special properties that makes             absorption into circulation easier than insulin from other sources or cause resistance             to proteolysis; ii) camel insulin is encapsulated in nanoparticles (lipid vesicles)             that make possible its passage through the stomach and entry into the circulation;             iii) some other elements of camel milk make it anti-diabetic. Sequence of camel             insulin and its predicted digestion pattern do not suggest differentiability to             overcome the mucosal barriers before been degraded and reaching the blood stream.             However, we cannot exclude the possibility that insulin in camel milk is present             in nanoparticles capable of transporting this hormone into the bloodstream. Although,             much more probable is that camel milk contains 'insulin-like' small molecule substances             that mimic insulin interaction with its receptor.
authors: Protein Research Chair, Department of Biochemistry, College of                     Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
authors: Ajamaluddin
authors: A
authors: Malik
authors: Abdulrahman
authors: A
authors: Al-Senaidy
authors: Ewa
authors: E
authors: Skrzypczak-Jankun
authors: Jerzy
authors: J
authors: Jankun
mesh_terms: D020816:Amino Acid Motifs; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D002162:Camelus; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007004:Hypoglycemic Agents / Q000737:chemistry*; D007328:Insulin / Q000737:chemistry*; D008892:Milk / Q000737:chemistry*; D008958:Models, Molecular; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010802:Phylogeny; D011487:Protein Conformation; D059748:Proteolysis; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D013379:Substrate Specificity
chemical_list: D007004:Hypoglycemic Agents; D007328:Insulin