Diabetes mellitus being a major global health problem has to be dealt firmly. It is a multifactorial disease causing several complications such as retinopathy, nephropathy, neuropathy, cardiovascular diseases, and so forth. Hence, it demands a multiple therapeutic approach at low cost with lesser toxicity and minimal side effects. Recently, efforts are being made to discover novel herbal antidiabetic agents as an alternative to the synthetic agents.

Major hindrance in amalgamation of herbal medicine in modern medical practices is lack of scientific and clinical data proving their efficacy and safety. There is a need for conducting clinical research in herbal drugs and developing simple bioassays for biological standardization and pharmacological and toxicological evaluation. It is also important to establish the active component/s from these plant extracts.

We invite authors to submit original research as well as review articles that add value to the existing knowledge of traditional system of medicine by highlighting the importance of herbal medicines in the cure of diabetes, emerging as a major health problem. We are particularly interested in articles that explore the efficacy of herbs in managing diabetes and the complications associated with it. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Latest technologies for clinical evaluation of herbal antidiabetic drugs
• Role of oxidative stress in severity of diabetes mellitus and its management
• Identification of molecular targets for curing diabetes mellitus
• Development and testing of novel and effective antidiabetic drugs derived from plants
• Phytochemical investigation of antidiabetic plants and isolation of compounds having hypoglycemic effect
• Elucidating the mechanism of action of hypoglycemic effect of plants
• New cellular and animal models to test and understand the antidiabetic effect of plants

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ecam/herbd/ according to the following timetable: