The Missing Link in Diabetes
Diabetes can be caused and a few people are more prone to get it than others. I think it is an artificial agent that is linked to the chromosomes will cause the pancreas to stop producing insulin, and now recently available medication can reverse this effect. Diet can also caused the conset of diabetes but different age groups are unlikely able to get it at the same time, unless of course they live in the same household. I think the anwers lie in the genome of the body where DNA tests can identify the event that triggers the onset of diabetes, by comparing a diabetes patient and a non diabetes patient. An external event can trigger diabetes, which can occur naturally and is linked to a person's age and lifestyle. The discovery of Type 3 diabetes. Symptons : Extreme drinking of water. Blurred vision. Multiple trips to toilet. Urinary Tract Infection. Kidney diesase. Tooth Decay. Weakness - no strength. Insomia.
PARIS, May 11 - Researchers believe they have made an important breakthrough in understanding the severest form of diabetes, confirming that the disease begins when the body's immune system reacts to the hormone insulin. Their work, published on Thursday in the British science journal Nature, may bring the curtain down on a frustrating hunt for the initial trigger for Type 1 diabetes and throws open new paths in the search for a treatment. Diabetes occurs when lack of insulin causes wild fluctuations of glucose in the blood, leading to cardiovascular problems, even loss of limbs, kidney failure, blindness and death.
Type 1 diabetes is the severer, inherited but thankfully rarer form of the disease -- it is an auto-immune disorder, in which the body attacks itself, with catastrophic consequences. It usually occurs in childhood, when immune cells called lymphocytes start to attack beta islet cells that make insulin in the pancreas.
A vicious circle then starts up. The remnants of the beta cells are transported to a draining lymph node in the pancreas, where they attract the attention of immune-system scouts, which in turn prime more lymphocytes to destroy more beta cells. After 80-90 percent of the beta cells have been wiped out, the first clinical symptoms of diabetes show up. Patients have to take insulin shots the rest of their life, and be rigorous about their dietary habits, to help keep their blood sugar levels stable. But what causes the destructive cascade in the first place? What is the trigger -- the antigen -- that causes the immune system to go haywire like this? To find out, University of Colorado scientist George Eisenbarth and colleagues took a strain of mice that usually develop Type 1 diabetes. Some of the rodents were then genetically engineered so that they lacked normal insulin. To ensure that these mice did not die, the team modified the rodents' genes so that they provided a form of insulin that was hormonally active but which would not be recognised by lymphocytes. Mice with the normal insulin fell sick with diabetes -- but mice with the modified insulin remained healthy. In another paper that also points to insulin as the culprit antigen, Harvard Medical School's David Hafler and colleagues isolated immune cells from the pandreatic draining node of patients with Type 1 diabetes. In a lab dish, they identified the proteins to which these immune cells responded. Half of these cells responded when they were exposed to just a fragment of the insulin molecule. But there was no such response among immune cells taken from healthy patients without diabetes. The pioneering work clearly points the finger at insulin as the trigger which unleashes autoimmune lymphocytes, said immune system specialist Matthias von Herrath in a commentary.
The discovery throws up exciting avenues for potential treatment, perhaps by wiping out the aggressive cells or preventing them from going on the offensive in the first place, he said. But the crucial first step will be to identify exactly which proteins and peptides on the insulin molecule are recognised by the aggressive lymphocytes, and what precisely happens to the cells once they are primed this way. Type 1 diabetes affects about one every 400-500 children and adolescents in the United States. Although the disease has a genetic cause, it can be amplified by nutrition and infection. The other sort of diabetes, Type 2, is linked to obesity and other lifestyle causes, and has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. It accounts for about 90 percent of all cases of diabetes and usually shows up in adults aged 40 or above. In this case, insulin is produced but at insufficient levels or does not work efficiently, either because it is defective in some way or the cells themselves have become resistant to it.
- AFP
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