1.0 Introduction
The use of indigenous plants in the management of diseases has been a common practice over the years. Few of the plants have received adequate scientific scrutiny. The study and understanding of ethno — botanical information, chemical constituents of plants and therapeutic application of the plant drug will help in understanding efficiency of the plant as a potent remedy; extend our knowledge of their pharmacological activity, active principles, dosage and administration (Unger et al., 2008).
Diabetes mellitus has been defined by the world health organization (WHO), on the basis of laboratory findings as a fasting venous plasma glucose concentration greater than 7.8 mmol/l (140mg/dl) or greater than 11.1 mmol/l (200mg/dl) two hours after a carbohydrate meal or two hours after an oral ingestion of the equivalent of 75g glucose, even if the fasting concentration is normal (Nwanjo and Nwokoro, 2004).
It is a metabolic disease characterized by hyperglycaemia and glycosuria due to absolute or relative lack of insulin (Ononogbu, 1996).Medicinal plants have formed the basis of health care throughout the world since the earliest days of humanity and are still widely used and have considerable importance in international trade (Unger et al., 2008). In certain African countries for instance, up to 90% of the population still relies exclusively on plants as a source of medicines (hostettmann et al., 2000). As a consequences, the World Health Organization (WHO) had in one of its charters in Geneva recommended further investigation into this area, particularly, as it concerns chronic and debilitating disease such as diabetes mellitus (WHO, 1980).
A complex disease like diabetes mellitus, where little is talked about in aspects of prevention and curation, but rather management, there is an increased focus on plants in the search for appropriate hypoglycaemic / antihyperglycaemic agents (Ebong et al, 2008). Firstly, because of leads provided by traditional medicine to natural products that may be better treatments than currently used conventional drugs (Nwanjo et al., 2004). Secondly the plants by secondary metabolic means contain a variety of herbal and non-herbal ingredients that are thought to act on a variety of targets by various modes and mechanisms (Tiwari and Rao, 2002) given the multi-factorial pathogen city of the disorders.
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