Professor at the Federal University of Santa Maria, RS, Brazil.
Lecture: Biocompounds and diabetes: focus on the purinergic system and oxidative stress.
Abstract: Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a condition characterized by hyperglycemia resulting from an inneficiency of the organism to use blood glucose adequately. Chronic hyperglycemia increases the frequency of non-enzymatic glucose adduction with proteins, lipids and DNA. These will form advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which alter the structure and function of several proteins. The enzymes that degrade adenine nucleotides, such as NTPDases and 5′-nucleotidase (ectonucleotidases), regulate ATP, ADP and adenosine levels, which are important signaling molecules. The main objective of this lecture is to present the results obtained by our research group on diabetes, oxidative stress and biocompounds in the past years. Our results demonstrated that, in general, hyperglycemia increases ectonucleotidases activities (platelets and synaptosomes of cerebral cortex from rats induced to diabetes by streptozotocin or alloxan) and oxidative stress (Lunkes et al., 2008; Schmatz et al., 2009; Stefanello et al., 2016; Maciel et al., 2016). Furthermore, our studies have shown that the treatment with biocompounds can prevent cellular damage caused by DM. We demonstrated beneficial effects from different biocompounds on diabetes, as follow: resveratrol (Schmatz et al., 2009); chlorogenic acid which also effectively reduced platelet aggregation (Stefanello et al., 2016); quercetin (Maciel et al., 2016); caffeic acid and caffeine (Stefanello et al., 2016). For example, resveratrol and rosmarinic acid reversed the decreasing of Catalase and Superoxide dismutase activities in the kidney and liver of diabetic rats (Schmatz et al., 2009; Musthaq et al., 2015). In conclusion, biocompounds, as cited above, can provide vascular and neuroprotection, which may be useful in the prevention and progression of damage caused by diabetes mellitus.