Slashdot Mirror
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.
Sweet!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
TFA Title: Diabetes breakthrough
Slashdot Title: Near-Complete Cure For Diabetes in Two Years?
Why not fork?
You have to respond 'Mouse' to the question:
"Are you a man or mouse?"
for the injection to be successful, otherwise you just develop a serious cheese addiction.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Why? They share most of the same body parts, organs and systems. Everything works the same way as it does in us. We're only a few ticks away on the genetic map. I'd be more surprised if they didn't work like us.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Because insulin was discovered via experiments on dogs, and for the first ~60 years of treatment, insulin was produced from pig and cow pancreases.
Yep, they work like - except that they operate their computers with a wireless or corded 'bloke' and read self-improvement books like "who moved my burger"
AT&ROFLMAO
I guess the planet is really ruled by mice and that they are forcing scientists the world over to work on curing mouse diseases, as expounded in HHGG.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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
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.
We all know that slashdot is full of bad humor, and if we want good humor, we have to look somewhere else.
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.
Even if it's perpetually a few years away, that's better than perpetually 20 years away, right?
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.
I am sorry for the pesimistic title. But as a Diabetic for the last 21 years, I have seen it all. If you follow this stuff, there seems to be one landmark approach after the other.
And what happens?
Very little. The approach rarely pans out or is sustainable, like the islet transplant techniques of a few years ago.
Diabetics, go for a run. Eat sensibly, and care for your body. Anything long term, is years, perhaps decades away.
--Alan
This isn't a press release about some research conducted over the weekend. If you read the article (I know it is /. tradition to never RTFA), you will see they are talking about their publication in the journal Cell, which is a pretty respected medical journal. The article was written in May, and only published a few days ago. It has been peer reviewed, and your characterization that it is just a scam for fame and fortune is a sad insight into the state of drive-by criticism so prevalent on the internet these days.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
it probably would have been easier to just quit tariffing sugar and subsidizing corn so that they stop using the bane we know as "high fructose corn syrup".
I'm just sayin...
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
They are similar in name because of the symptoms, not because of the underlying cause.
Type 1 Diabetes is caused when the immune system attacks the islet cells in the pancreas. The islet cells are what produce insulin and when they shut down from the attack, your blood sugar levels rise. (Slowly at first, but at more islet cells are killed/incapacitated your glucose levels go steadily higher.) This can lead to circulation problems, blindness, and death among other things if not controled by injections of insulin.
In Type 2 Diabetics, insulin is still produced, but the body is resistant to it for some reason. (possibly from a person eating too many carbohydrates over a long period of time or because of genetic reasons.) In a lot of cases this can be treated with a diet low in carbohydrates along with regular exercise. Other drugs may be needed in some cases where diet and exercise are not enough. Some doctors suggest a healthy balance of protein along with any carbs you eat.
Some women can have "Type 3" Diabetes when they are pregnant. I don't have much information on this, but from what I understand it tends to clear up after childbirth in most cases.
A person can also become diabetic from pancreatic cancer. (But in this case the diabetes is pretty much the least of their worries...)
You can learn more about the various types of diabetes at http://www.diabetes.org/
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 cure will come a day after I assume room temperature. I have had it for 59 years. Hanging in there...
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.
I am not a libertarian, but I am suspicious of demands that "those other people should be more self-sacrificing". Everybody complains about greedy drug companies, but except in rare cases, the folks complaining aren't taking 2nd jobs so they can donate the extra income to support medical research. It seems that it's somebody else's responsibility to make sacrifices.
Who exactly should be making the sacrifice? Should the unions that hold stock in the drug companies cut their pensions? Should the scientists and doctors doing the research take pay cuts? How about the folks who wash the glassware and tend the mice? Maybe the graphic designers who create the advertising? We could spread the sacrifice across the board by raising taxes, but most of the US seems convinced that they are already overtaxed.
RTFA - part of the big point here is that their research shows that this type of treatment cures BOTH types, indicating that contrary to what is believed, BOTH types have a similar cause, not just similar symptoms.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
I encourage you to read the primary literature of the study: http://www.cell.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=P IIS0092867406014656&highlight=salter
Then your opinion may or may not change, or may or may not have any credibility left. As a trained scientist, I think this is a very remarkable study, far more promising then the stop-gap measures we currently have for diabetes treatment. Let's not make opinions based on headlines.
Again with the conspiracy theories. Take off the damn tin foil. This is already a FDA approved treatment. Just this particular medical application is off-label. And the FDA isn't going to have much say in whether this is approved in Canada where the research is being done.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
Honestly, I do understand your complaint. A paper gets published by a grad student, or some joker who can't even get their PhD and is squeaking out a master's degree shows up at a poster session with a pile of photocopied papers and some newspaper reporter wandering through turns it into a wire story that goes across the headlines of the global news industry. It's not terribly uncommon, but the problem is not with the scientists or the way scientific research works, it's in how the mainstream media reports on it. It's hard to get published in the big name journals like Cell, so it's likely this has gone past a sharp eyed committee of experts in the field. It may well be preliminary, but if so, that's made clear in the source paper. By the time it hits Slashdot it has passed through a game of telephone and has become a miracle cure.
But don't say they reported prematurely. They published their results, which is not only their job, it's their duty as ethical researchers.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If you think that the paramedics & EMTs who come when you dial 9-1-1 should be able to break down the door, go find out what the law is in your area. In some states, I suspect they can break down doors. If your state doesn't let them, write to your legislators and governor asking for them to be granted that power.
These are brave researchers to challenge the orthodox view of purely auto-immune diabetes. It reminds me of what resistance there was to redefining ulcers as a curable inflection, versus a psychological or personality flaw that was incurable or required surgery removing most of the stomach. In the end Drs. Warren and Marshall won a Nobel prize, but not before enduring years of abuse and almost having their careers destroyed. I hope medicine is more open to radical new ideas today.
Good News! Your diabetes has been nearly cured. All you will have to is get periodic injections, and monitor your blood sugar. Other than that, you're cured!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Umm, I'm not sure if that was a joke or not, but mice share so many of the ailments that we do because we give them to 'em.
Hundreds of substances have already been demonstrated to cure mice of obesity, diabetes, or hypertension. They have all been published in prestigious journals as well. A few years ago, leptin was thought to be a wonder drug that would cure obesity in humans, because leptin caused mice to lose weight permanently.
Of course, human metabolism has turned out to be far more complicated than mice. The only value of mice tests is to
1. make sure it probably won't kill humans.
2. demonstrate an effect, and claim that the same will happen in humans
a) even though the same effect may not happen in humans
b) even though any number of drugs may have no effect on mice, but have an effect on humans
c) get venture capitalist funding
d) become the laughingstock of the science community a year later
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