Introduction: Diabetic neuropathy (DN) is one of the major complications arising from hyperglycaemia in diabetic patients. In recent years polyphenols present in plants have gained attention to treat DN. The main advantages associated with them are their action via different molecular pathways to manage DN and their safety. However, they failed to gain clinical attention due to challenges associated with their formulation development such as lipophilicity,poor bioavailability, rapid systemic elimination, and enzymatic degradation.Area covered: This article includes different polyphenols that have shown their potential against DN in preclinical studies and the research carried out towards development of their nanoformulations in order to overcome aforementioned issues.Expert opinion: In this review various polyphenol based nanoformulations such as nanospheres, self-nanoemulsifying drug delivery systems, niosomes, electrospun nanofibers, metallic nanoparticles explored exclusively to treat DN are discussed. However, the literature available related to polyphenol based nanoformulations to treat DN is limited. Moreover, these experiments are limited to preclinical studies. Hence, more focus is required towards development of nanoformulations using simple and single step process as well as inexpensive and non-toxic excipients so that a stable, scalable, reproducible and non-toxic formulation could be achieved and clinical trials could be initiated.
Diabetic wound (DW) is a secondary application of uncontrolled diabetes and affects about 42.2% of diabetics. If the disease is left untreated/uncontrolled, then it may further lead to amputation of organs. In recent years, huge research has been done in the area of wound dressing to have a better maintenance of DW. These include gauze, films, foams or, hydrocolloid-based dressings as well as polysaccharide- and polymer-based dressings. In recent years, scaffolds have played major role as biomaterial for wound dressing due to its tissue regeneration properties as well as fluid absorption capacity. These are three-dimensional polymeric structures formed from polymers that help in tissue rejuvenation. These offer a large surface area to volume ratio to allow cell adhesion and exudate absorbing capacity and antibacterial properties. They also offer a better retention as well as sustained release of drugs that are directly impregnated to the scaffolds or the ones that are loaded in nanocarriers that are impregnated onto scaffolds. The present review comprehensively describes the pathogenesis of DW, various dressings that are used so far for DW, the limitation of currently used wound dressings, role of scaffolds in topical delivery of drugs, materials used for scaffold fabrication, and application of various polymer-based scaffolds for treating DW.