Trends in publication of evidence-based Traditional Iranian medicine in endocrinology and metabolic disorders

Traditional Iranian medicine (TIM) is a main part of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). The popularity and use of alternative therapies are increasing due to adverse effects and ineffectiveness of pharmacologic treatments in some cases. Herbal medicine is one of the methods of traditional therapy that plays a key role in the treatment of various diseases specifically in diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia and obesity that are growing rapidly in the world. In this article, trends of scientific publications of Iranian medicine in endocrinology and metabolic disorders have been investigated. Our data show that the numbers of related researches have uptrend from 2000 till now. These data are valuable to pharmaceutical companies to get the idea to invest and produce effective drugs. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2251-6581-12-49) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.