When Will They Find The Cure For Diabetes? (type 1)?
12 September 2009
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I have had diabetes for almost 5 years now and its getting old… When are they supposed to discover the cure? Are they at least close???
Tags: diabetes
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Never !! The drug companies make so much profit from diabetes that they would be silly to find a cure. Period. >
There have been some remarkable break throughs recently. Some involve transplantation of specific cells for the diabetic pancrease, others involve (last summer) using a chemical called Leptin to reverse diabetes without insulin.
A tremendous amount of research continues in diabetes treatment, with some researchers suggesting better treatments leading to a ‘cure’ within a decade.
Keep your hopes up. Remember that any future cure may or may not reverse damage from uncontrolled diabetes, and continue to monitor and treat yourself appropriately.
Here is some more info:
A Dallas-based researcher says he’s pulled off a medical first: successfully treating mice and rats dying of insulin-dependent diabetes without using insulin.
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Dr. Roger Unger, chair of diabetes research at UT Southwestern Medical School, is quick to warn that practical applications, if any, are years away. But the research team he headed used high levels of leptin, a substance naturally produced by fat cells, to somehow reverse the otherwise fatal effects of diabetes.
If the experiment is repeated in other labs, and then if leptin can be adapted to treat humans, it might offer the first alternate to the multiple insulin injections used by millions of people who have type 1 diabetes, Dr. Unger said.
How surprising was the result of the experiment?
“It would be like finding aliens landing in your backyard,” Dr. Unger said.
It’s not easy for diabetes to surprise Dr. Unger. He’s been a top researcher for decades with a long list of honors from many major diabetes-related organizations. At 84, he’s still someone that others in the field pay attention to.
His latest findings were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, titled “Making insulin-deficient type 1 diabetic rodents thrive without insulin,” will get plenty of attention, said Dr. Rohit N. Kulkarni, a researcher at the Joslin Diabetes Center and professor at Harvard Medical School who is also investigating the effects of leptin.
“I think it’s very interesting and intriguing – with an emphasis on the latter,” he said. “It’s quite unexpected.”
Leptin may blunt the short-term impact of Type 1 diabetes – the rapid weight loss and altered blood chemistry that make the untreated disease fatal. It may also help control the longer-term effects of the disease caused by abnormally high levels of sugar in the bloodstream.
But the results reported in this new paper offer almost as many questions as they do answers, Dr. Unger said. And he figures the initial reaction to the results from many other researchers will be negative, “just like mine was,” he said.
Why is it such a surprise? Ever since 1921, when researchers first linked what is now known as type 1 diabetes to a lack of insulin, doctors have assumed that the only successful treatment replaced insulin, usually through multiple daily injections. This new experiment rejuvenated mice and rats without using insulin.
“There’s not a human being who knows anything about diabetes who would have said they would get better without insulin,” Dr. Unger said.
Specialized cells in the pancreas called beta cells respond to the level of sugar in the bloodstream by producing insulin. The hormone has at least two functions:
It acts like a key to a locking gas cap, letting many kinds of cells absorb sugar from the blood to use for fuel.
Insulin also sits on the opposite side of a biochemical teeter-totter from a hormone called glucagon. Glucagon tells liver cells to dump storage supplies of sugar into the bloodstream, providing more fuel as needed. At higher levels, it signals cells to convert amino acids and fats into fuel – basically telling the body to “burn” muscle and fat.
In Type 1 diabetes, which affects about a million people in the United States, the body’s immune system mistakenly kills the beta cells — and the ability of the body to produce insulin.
Without insulin on the other side of the teeter-totter, excess glucagon over-triggers the consumption of muscle and fat, which produces the wasting and rapidly fatal symptoms associated with untreated type 1 diabetes, Dr. Unger said.
In the experiment reported in the new paper, Dr. Unger’s team injected genetically modified viruses that infected the rodents’ liver cells and turned them into leptin-producers.
In a matter of days, the wasting effects of excess glucagon stopped and blood sugar levels dropped near normal. After a few weeks, the leptin levels went down and the blood sugar levels went back up — but not nearly as high as for untreated mice. And the otherwise fatal high-glucagon symptoms never returned, even after almost a year.
A few scientists have thought that leptin was involved with the balance between insulin and glucagon and a few earlier experiments had used leptin along
I too am sick and tired of this diabetes nonsense. It’s caused me severe polyneuropathy, and I’m now disabled. Even after having done everything, “the right way”. I know I sound like one of those nut jobs that talk about the Kennedy conspiracy theories, but I personally believe it was figured out a long time ago. I personally think that the pharmaceutical companies have a strangle hold on a lot of entities making big bucks just allowing people like yourself, and me to suffer. As long as they are able to turn huge profits forcing us to buy all that is required us to keep us alive, the cure won’t surface itself. I had this discussion with my endo, and he just about laughed me out of his office. I’m just putting it out there.
i have type one and i have also had it for five years, since i was ten.
the sad part is they have found one, but they wont use it. they gave protein shotsto diabetic animals, and it busted there amune system into working good, and there pancreas started kicking out insulin again, they also have used stem cell for something, and it has worked, but i dont remember specificaly what it did..
just for now we have to take shots, and wait.the estimated time is about five more years, but doctors…are pretty weird.
This is an interesting question, but unfortunately the answer is still uncertain. It is like asking, “When do we find a good substitute for fossil fuel?” Business is so good that nobody wants to disturb the present system of their profitabiity as against our needs and disease. So, let us just grin and bear it. Good luck to you.
The cure will be discovered on January 22, 2036. By Dr. Melvin Blaskowicz.
lol…. yeah it’s getting old for a lot of people, for thousands of years.
I don’t think a cure is about to be found, but I’m not really up on the latest news.
Search up stem cell research and diabetes, if all goes well with it you might have your cure, along with the cure for cancer and almost everything else!
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