**5. Antioxidant as therapeutic agents in the management of diabetes mellitus**

Despite efforts to control blood glucose, tissue and organ damage are cumulative over many years in most diabetic patients. Varying degrees of hyperglycemia are virtually unavoidable in subjects with diabetes mellitus and glycemic memory has been used to describe the development of diabetes-related complications in diabetic patients even after normoglycemia has been restored and initial glycemic environment is remembered in the target organs [105,147]. It is noteworthy that ROS has been implicated as a major cause of the metabolic memory after glucose normalization due to the chains of reactions leading to cell damage and loss of cellular function. Due to the implication of hyperglycemia-induced oxidative stress in diabetes, these patients should in theory benefit from antioxidant supplementation. The beneficial effect of antioxidants has been reported in animal models of diabetes and in diabetic patients [50, 148]
