Could Diabetes Spread Like Mad Cow Disease? (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, a new study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don't indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread the disease.

The work is "very exciting" and "well-documented" for showing that the protein has some prionlike behavior, says prion biologist Witold Surewicz of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who wasn't connected to the research. However, he cautions against jumping to the conclusion that diabetes spreads from person to person. The study raises that possibility, he says, but "it remains to be determined."

Comments

Re:Or Sugar

[jenningsthecat]

... Autoimmune diseases also run in my family, and there is some evidence that Type 2 for some people at least has an autoimmune component.

Interesting connection there, given that carbohydrates, (especially the simple ones), are implicated in inflammation. So maybe sugar causes inflammation that can eventually degrade to an autoimmune disorder, while in other people the autoimmune component is genetic, as in your case.

Maybe in people whose Type 2 diabetes is eliminated when they change their diet, the inflammation response never developed into an autoimmune disorder. So perhaps there are 3 different varieties of Type 2 diabetes - lifestyle-triggered reversible, lifestyle-triggered irreversible, and genetic-therefore-irreversible. Just a thought ...