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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.
Sweet!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
TFA Title: Diabetes breakthrough
Slashdot Title: Near-Complete Cure For Diabetes in Two Years?
Why not fork?
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
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.
ok, ok, i'll do the work for you...
P IIS0092867406014656
http://www.cell.com/content/article/abstract?uid=
the link to the PDF for the entire article is to the right of the page
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.
You mean like the PETA VP, Mary Beth Sweetland, who is a type A diabetic and rationalized "I don't see myself as a hypocrite; I need my life to fight for the rights of animals."
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.
Yes, because using Google is so damn hard. Enter "Cell Journal" into Google. First link. The Article is available.
To purchase it is not like spending money but rather it is an investment in the future in a blow against the empire
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
That's possibly the most absurd thing I've ever read. If animal studies reveal nothing, why do they get performed? It's not like some evil corporate entity is forcing animal studies on scientists who secretly wish they could just stick these compounds in humans without bothering to test them out on animals first. No ethical scientist would ever want to do that and risk killing or injuring somebody without animal safety data, or getting somebody's hopes up without any efficacy testing in an animal model first.
Specific animals are usually chosen for studies because certain biological systems function in a very similar way to the relevant human biological system. Heck, plenty of drugs that work on humans work on cats and dogs and probably lots of mammals. Certain NSAIDs, antibiotics, steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, benzodiazepenes (anti-anxiety drugs like valium), and some chemotherapy agents developed for use in humans, just to name a few drugs commonly used with cats and dogs off the top of my head.
Your suggestion then that the results of animal trials bear "no relation" to how they will perform in humans is simply nonsensical. Many drugs may seem to be active in animals, but in humans turn out to be no better than other drugs on the market in terms of efficacy and worse in terms of side effects, which commonly leads to dropping them from commercialization. Differential comparisons of drug efficacy in animal models aren't necessarily useful to determining which drugs will be the most effective in humans, and side effects are not always equivalent, but that's not the point of animal trials - the point is to establish that the basic biological mechanism works in vivo and to get a vague concept of possible safe dosing in an animal model before moving to initial human safety tests.
I fail to see how you and the other animal rights loonies can have such a poor grasp of how scientific research works and yet feel qualified to comment so authoritatively on it.
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.
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