Entries for the ‘Diabetes Research’ Category

Too little Sleep Might Lead to Diabetes

If your busy life style causes you to lose sleep, you might be heading towards diabetes mellitus.

But don’t be tempted to have too many ‘lie ins’, because excessive sleep could lead to just the same end result.

This is the somewhat unusual outcome of a recent study that suggests too little or too much sleep may cause the blood sugar illness, at least for oldtimers.

“This is one additional piece of information bolstering the common recommendation for sleeping seven to eight hours a night,” reported study co-producer Dr. Daniel Gottlieb, of Boston University.

Dr.Gottlieb and his colleagues studied detailed stats covering the health of nearly 1500 members of a previous research that covered the cardiovascular effects of sleep disorders that also affected breathing. those participating were middle aged to elderly.

The goal of the doctors was to see if they could find a factor that connected sleep issuesand impaired ability to metabolize blood sugar, a symptom of diabetes. They state their findings in this week’s issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Compared with the participants who slept seven to eight hours, the participants who had less than 5 hours sleep were 2.5 times more likely to have diabetes. The rate of diabetes was somewhat lower for those who achieved 6 hours sleep.

The diabetes rate was also higher for the participants who slept for longer than 9 hours.

Inhalable insulin now available

With millions of our population living with Diabetes, a recent treatment is being praised by researchers. It’s called Exubera, the first insulin that doesn’t need injecting.

Right now approximately 4 million diabetics take insulin. In the views of the FDA, millions more should inject it but are scared of the hyperdermic needles that are part of the process.

Exubera is approved, (but not for children), for Type one and Type two Diabetes.

Doctors say diabetes sufferers must use two or three puffs in advance of every meal to avoid the awful issues that are related to Diabetes.

Exubera is a short-acting insulin that can be taken by both patients with type 1 diabetes and suferrers from type-two diabetes mellitus, but long-acting insulin must still be taken.

According to Pfizer, The new inhaler isn’t recommended if you are currently a smoker, start smoking during the treatment or have given up smoking less than 6 months ago.

The cost compares well with other diabetes medications, it is $3 to $5 a day wholesale cost.

For nearly half of her adult life, starting with her last pregnancy 40 years ago, Christine Miller has been a sufferer of Type-two diabetes. Because she did not need to take insulin, Miller was able to tackle her ailment with tablet based drugs.

However 3 years ago, at the age of 79, Miller hit another problem — cognitive decline. Her children took her to the health centre where she was diagnosed with Alzheimers.

Was there possibly something that connected Miller’s many years of diabetes and her mental deficiency?

Until quite recently, diabetes experts could have ignored such a link as irrelevant.

Now, it is one of the most important areas of study into alzheimers disease. It is also becoming an accepted view amongst some Alzheimer’s experts: Keep your blood sugar levels tightly controlled and you might minimise your risk of getting alzheimer’s.

The link has been showing up more and more, both in epidemic studies and medical trials that use diabetic drugs to treat individuals with dementia.

But the exact reason that increased sugar or uncontrolled insulin can cause significant brain cell death still is not totally appreciated.

Right now, most of the focus of Study into alzheimers disease is on beta-amyloid, the protein that rises in the brains of individuals with the condition.

A Cure for Diabetes May be Close!

In the search for a cure for diabetes, a recent development has stunned even the experts involved. Scientists at a Toronto medical center claim that they have proof the the nerve system is responsible for triggering diabetes, a fact which may well lead to the possibility of a cure for the diabetes, an illness which causes problems for many millions in the affluent world.

Mice that had been given diabetes became healthy within 24 hours after medical experts introduced a compound to circumvent the effect of reduced neurons in the pancreas.

"I couldn’t believe it," reported Dr. Michael Salter, an expert in pain at the Hospital for Sick Children and one of the researchers involved in the discovery. "Mice with diabetes suddenly didn’t have diabetes any more." In essence, it appeared that this was a cure for their diabetes.

The specialists urge caution, warning that they still have to prove their study in humans, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or two. Any possible cure for diabetes that may develop is most likely to be years away from hitting the general public..

Having said that, the team from Sick Children, who published their research today in the well known journal ‘Cell’, are still immensely excited, and hope that this is a major step towards the cure for diabetes that the medical world has been seeking..

"I’ve never seen anything like it," stated Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, an expert in immunology the hospital and a leader of the studies.

Their research may overthrow the current view that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the disorder that often occurs when the sufferer is still a child, was wholly brought on by auto-immune reactions, in other words, the patient’s immune system working against itself.

Their study also suggests that there is far more in common than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and that our nerves likely play a role in other irreversible inflammatory sicknesses, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease.

This impressive study opens "a novel, exciting door to address one of the diseases with large societal impact," said Doctor Christian Stohler, chair of the University of Maryland Department of Biologic and Materials Sciences and a well respected pain specialist, who has reviewed the ‘cure for diabetes’ claims.

Many millions have diabetes mellitus, with 10% having Type-one and 90% Type-two. The condition is the 6th most significant cause of death reported on U.S. death certificates, and many experts believe that it is even higher due to ‘under reporting’.

Diabetes is a disease in which the sufferers body doesn’t create or make correct use of insulin. Insulin is a hormone that is essential to transform glucose into energy needed for life. The causes of diabetes mellitus continues to be unknown, although both genetics and lifestyle factors such as obesity and absence of physical exercise are believed to play a role. At the present time, there is no known cure for diabetes.

The symptoms of diabetes are:

* The initial symptom of diabetes mellitus might be unusual thirst (unrelated to physical exercise, warm weather, or temporary ill health)
* Excessive hunger; (you are sure that you have consumed enough, however you still want more)
* Frequent urination, (commonly noticed because you have to wake repeatedly during the night)
* Feeling tired and feeling fatigued (often sudden enough to make you fall asleep unexpectedly after eating). This is one of the most frequently observed symptoms of diabetes).
* Sudden and unusual weight loss (any dramatic change in body weight is a message that you should visit your doctor)

Insulin injection is the only method of treating Type one diabetes, and even this doesn’t prevent many of the negative consequences, from heart attacks to kidney failure. It is not a cure for diabetes, merely a way of reducing some of the consequences and aiding longevity of the patient.

In the new research the team injected capsaicin, (the main active compound in chili peppers), into the pancreas in order to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in lab mice that had Type one diabetes mellitus. The astonishing outcome was that the islets immediately began producing insulin at normal levels - in other words, it looked awfully like it was a cure for diabetes !

It turns out the nerves secrete neuropeptides that are a key factor in the correct functioning of the islets. Later research by the medical researchers, which involved the University of Calgary and the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, proved that the nerves in mice that had been given diabetes were secreting too few of the neuropeptides, causing a cycle of stress on the islets.

The researchers then injected a neuropeptide referred to as "substance p" in to the pancreas cells of diabetic rodents. the result was that the inflammation disappeared and the diabetes appeared to be cured. Some mice have remained in that state for 4 months or more, after only one dose.

The experts also found that this procedure reduced the insulin resistance that is the main distinguishing feature of Type-2 diabetes. This also seems to imply that insulin resistance is also a component part in Type-1 diabetes, which further suggests that the two types of diabetes are far more similar than previously thought.

The medical researchers are now trying to confirm that the connection between our nerves and diabetes holds true for people. If it does, they will see if their procedure has identically the same effect on humans as it did on laboratory mice.

Again, caution is urged - it is very early days and even if the research holds true any cure for diabetes will be years away. The best advice for all diabetics is to carry on with you diabetic care regimes exactly as normal.

Read more about this Diabetes Breakthrough.

Pancreatic Transplant cures rats’ type 2 diabetes mellitus without need for antirejection medication : Sept. 12, 2006

A medical technique proven to cure a rat with type 1 or juvenile-onset diabetes mellitus was also effective for a rat of type 2, also known as adult-onset diabetes, according to a new report from doctors at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Commenting on the possiblity of a cure for diabetes:

“Finding that we can cure type 2 diabetes in the same way is very significant because in humans type 2 diabetes is almost 20 times more prevalent than type 1 diabetes,” says senior author Marc R. Hammerman, M.D., the Chromalloy Professor of Renal Diseases in Medicine. “There are about 200 million type 2 diabetics worldwide, and the incidence is rapidly increasing.”

The technique in question transplants precursors of the pancreas from pig embryos. In a previous study, Hammerman and co-developer Sharon A. Rogers,proved that they were able to transplant the pancreatic cells in a way that lets them transform into healthy insulin producing cells that do not trigger attacks by the rats’ immune systems. This cured the rats’ diabetes without needing immunosuppressive drugs vital to prevent rejection in other transplant-based treatments. This is a major break though in the search for a cure for diabetes.

Hammerman and Rogers are leaders in the revolutionary field of organogenesis, which focuses on growing organs from stem cells and other embryonic cell clusters known as ‘organ primordia’. Unlike embryonic stem cells, which may transform into any cell type, primordia are locked into changing to cells of a exact organ.

Their system of diabetes treatment makes use of pancreatic primordia from pigs. In previous studies, they established that taking the primordia when the pigs were young caused them to be “invisible” to the immune defense system, meaning there was no need for immunosuppression medication.

In the latest study they transplanted the pig primordia into a strain of rat with a malady that closely resembles human type 2 diabetes.

The outcome was just the same - the diabetes was cured without needing immunosuppression drugs.

Although it is not yet time to state that this will lead to a cure for diabetes in humans, it is a enormous stride in the right direction.