Context: Oxidative stress has crucial role in pathogenesis of diabetic nephropathy (DN). Despite satisfactory results from antioxidant therapy in rodent, antioxidant therapy showed conflicting results in combat with DN in diabetic patients.
Evidence acquisitions: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Google Scholar,Pubmed (NLM), LISTA (EBSCO) and Web of Science have been searched.
Results: Treatment of DN in human are insufficient with rennin angiotensin system (RAS) blockers, so additional agent ought to combine with this management. Meanwhile based on DN pathogenesis and evidences in experimental and human researches, the antioxidants are the best candidate. New multi-property antioxidants may be improved human DN that show high power antioxidant capacity, long half-life time, high permeability to mitochondrion, improve body antioxidants enzymes activity and anti-inflammatory effects.
Conclusions: Based on this review and our studies on diabetic rats, rosmarinic acid a multi-property antioxidant may be useful in DN patients, but of course, needs to be proven in clinical trials studies.
Keywords: Antioxidants; Diabetic nephropathy; Oxidative stress.