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Near-Complete Cure For Diabetes In Two Years?
resistant writes "Researchers at a Toronto hospital have stumbled upon a dramatic treatment for mouse diabetes, with large implications for the treatment of diabetes in humans. From the article: 'The islet inflammation cleared up and the diabetes was gone. Some have remained in that state for as long as four months, with just one injection... They also discovered that their treatments curbed the insulin resistance that is the hallmark of Type 2 diabetes, and that insulin resistance is a major factor in Type 1 diabetes, suggesting the two illnesses are quite similar.'"
Update: 12/17 03:46 GMT by KD : resistant adds that the Cell Journal article is posted as a PDF as well as in plain text.
Update: 12/17 03:46 GMT by KD : resistant adds that the Cell Journal article is posted as a PDF as well as in plain text.
I am a Type 1 Diabetic, and what's particularly interesting about this is that this cure is found in a totally new area of study. Most of the treatments, such as Dr. Faustman's rather successful treatment up at Harvard, is that this treats the nervous system rather than the immune system. If this turns out to be true, it's a HUGE discovery for this reason alone.
Very interesting. Just a couple weeks ago NPR had an interview with three doctors about how the body's inflammation response is turning out to play a much larger role in diseases then previously thought. link
One of the reasons we get hungry, even with a full stomach, is that some foods play havoc with our sugar levels. We go from hyper-glycemic to hypo-glycemic. That's why obesity and diabetes are closely associated. Being able to control our insulin levels better might give us better control of our appetites.
Of course, we could also go on a low fat vegan diet and live longer and healthier but that's not nearly as much fun.
I was reading a recent article about how someone theorized that humans currently have an overactive immune system. Long ago, a particularly nasty disease swept through the human population and only those with the most aggressive immune system survived. Of course, the legacy of this was that we have auto-immune diseases, asthma, and diabetes. Inflammation is great when fighting off invaders, but for ordinary living it's not so great.
Given the relationship between insulin levels and weight lost/gain, I wonder if this wil get commercialized as a weight loss solution faster than a diabetes cure.
of it. This is not some fancy targeted new drug. They simply injected capsiacin to block the pain nerves leading into the pancrease. Capsaicin blocks the k receptor which is why the topical capsaicin pain creams work so well. They noticed a similarity in the nerves leading into the pancrease and other pain nerve clusters so they made a simple inject. I would say it is a long way from a treatment, but it changed the paradigm of how to target diabetes drugs in a simple logical way. That is why this is interesting.
My son is a Type I diabetic and last month he had to do a year based timeline in math to learn about positive/negative integers. He did his on the discoveries related to diabetes and in particular insulin.
Lots of progress has been made over the years, and in particular the last 3 decades. The type of insulin he uses is just slightly older than he is.
The media is great at making everything seem like it is the next big discovery(witness the title of this article), but this is a pretty significant change in the understanding of the causes and possible cures of diabetes.
The injected substance is a natural substance already approved for injection for other medical purposes, and for this particular purpose (affecting nerve cells), although prior to this research no one had associated nerve cells with the onset of diabetes.
This research is as signifcant as it gets. Up there with the discovery of anti-biotics, and it represents a wave of change in how several diseases will be treated in the coming decade.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
I am (or was) a type 2 diabetic myself, so I know about getting my hopes up. A lot of strange things are happening in diabetes research lately, though, and it's starting to look like nobody really understood how it worked. Maybe they still don't, but they're at least starting to get a clue.
As for myself, I finally gave up on dieting last summer and opted for weight loss surgery. For some reason that nobody really understands yet, some forms of weight loss surgery cure type 2 diabetes about 75% of the time. Those were good enough odds for me, and I got lucky: it worked. I've been off of all the diabetes medications since the day I got out of the hospital. My blood sugar, while not quite down in the normal range yet, is lower than it was before then surgery when I was taking the medications. And losing 75 pounds probably didn't hurt either. :-) This isn't for everyone, but at least there are starting to be options.
because this was such a shocking discovery. The one thing about science is that it can stagnate. It does because we assume we know the whats and whys. This leads to the ignoring of approaches simply because, well we "just know" how it works. Like when we thought we knew everything about protiens, rna, and such, along comes an advance along lines not previously considered, whether by chance or just the luck of having the right group of people.
For me this is great news, my mother has been taking insulin shots for nearly 30 years. Recently animal based insulin products were removed from use, at least from the pool of what she has available. This wasn't some nefarious scheme of drug companies. It is because doctors perceived the new insulins to be better and easier to acquire. What is has led to is pure annoyance and even life threatening situations for many diabetics. Instead of two shots a days she was now in a regimen of 4 or more, using two different types; fast acting and slow acting. Even with multiple blood tests per day, watching what she was eating, she still went into conditions near death when her blood sugar either dropped into the teens or went over 500.
On a side note, bless my mother, she cannot recall my phone number all the time. She was alone at home as my father was away on a trip with friends and she had a bad reaction. She knew she was in trouble and managed to get some food down but passed out. When she awoke, very groggy and barely concious she managed to dial 911. The paradmedics could not enter the house as it was locked and they are not permitted to break down doors. She actually recalled my phone number and 911 contacted me. Needless to say I made a 10 minute trip in record time. Her blood sugar was in the low 20s when the Paramedics tested it. They would not even more her until they could get her stable. She was barely there. They actually had an ambulance on its way. Obviously she recovered.
Now because of this issue it was decided to put her on an insulin pump. A couple of people at work are also on the pump now, all for the same reason. It has become near impossible for some of them to regulate their blood sugar levels with the synthetics. So I look at a discovery like this as a near miracle. Hopefully the tests will prove out in a year or two. This type of discovery only happens because there are still people, working for either government, universities, and corporations, who defy common wisdom or by sheer luck stumble upon a whole new method.
While I don't know how much study was being done in this direction I can only hope it spurs others to investigate similar treatments for health problems considered to be nearly known is cause and scope. Its this openess to ideas that may just save us all one day.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I would only add that Cell is not just "a pretty respected medical journal".
It, along with Nature and Science, is one of the big three, the most respected
journals in most sciences. This does not guarantee against fraud but this is
not science by press release either. The other thing is that they talk of human
trials. Just to get approved for those you need buttload of evidence and it is
reviewed very thoroughly and it will be tested by many people, not just study
authors. Everything about this work seems proper, though once again there is no
real guarantee against fraud.
The newspaper article is a not quite accurate either, although it has less hyperbole than the parent. What the study actually says is that it appears that the sensory nervous system is playing a role in the development and progression of diabetes. That is the "blockbuster", since it was thought to be an autoimmune disease.
If verified, it provides yet another avenue of investigation into diabetes control and possibly cure, but this is a first study. A lot of work needs to be done to go between this and a standard treatment.
Important? Yes. Break out the champagne and declare diabetes is cured? No.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
In general, that's a fair viewpoint, but this may well be a BIG deal and very likely not in that class. Potentially, it may be more like Gerhard Domagk's discovery in 1932 that a dye called Prontosil (Sulfanilamide) could kill Streptococcus in vitro without (usually) killing the patient. Basically the sulfa drugs were the first drugs recognized by Western medicine other than Asprin and narcotic painkillers that actually did anything useful.
There are still plenty of things that can go wrong. The treatment may not work on humans. It may be a one time deal that wears off after a few years and can't be repeated. It may kill or maim some patients. There may be side effects that don't bother mice but are devestating in humans.
But in any case, the apparent mechanism here is a total suprise and may well lead to other effective treatments even if this specific treatment doesn't work. Diabetes is a very widespread disorder and it does not seem to be all that well understood.
Hopefully, this will be or will lead to an effective treatment.
As for what's in it for the authors ... quite likely a Nobel Prize if everything works out.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey