Cataract: A major secondary diabetic complication

Cataract is a visual impairment occurs due to the opacification of crystalline lens. It affects around 17 billion peoples worldwide, although incidence of cataracts is increasing day by day among the elderly persons. Still today except surgery no other effective treatment have been successfully developed so far, thus this present review is focused to highlights the etiological aspects, risk factors along with possible pharmacological prevention and animal models which are widely used for screening anticataract activity. The present review includes the list of plants and their phytoconstituents which have been evaluated pharmacologically for the treatment of cataract. From the review it can be concluded that antioxidant properties of plants phytochemicals are responsible for the anticataract activity. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/icpj.v1i7.10813 International Current Pharmaceutical Journal 2012, 1(7): 180-185