New MRI Technique Can Detect Diabetes 183
MonkeyBoy writes "Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center and Massachusetts General Hospital have unveiled a new magnetic nanoparticle based magnetic resonance imaging technique that can detect diabetes even before clinical symptoms. In mice they were able to take non-invasive images of pancreatic inflammation and its reversal for type 1 diabetes. Full article is available as a PDF from Pubmedcentral. Will we see rapid translation of these pre-clinical observations to prediction and/or stratification of type 1 diabetes and treatment of individuals with the disease? This would provide a crucially needed early predictor of response to therapy. As an added bonus it looks like the analysis was done on a Linux box too."
All I know is... (Score:5, Informative)
These guys will be making a LOT of money.
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Informative)
But it's absolutely useless for the 95% of diabetics who have Type 2 diabetes, which involves a resistance to insulance rather than a complete destruction of the insulin producing cells. And the MRI technique is fairly useless clinically, since MRI's are hideouosly expensive and cost many times what a C-peptide test costs, which also shows early onset of Type 1.
Re:Open Source Medicine? (Score:5, Informative)
Methink you're talking bollocks for the sake of plugging "open source" somewhere...
What "stuff" is it that pharmaceutical companies need to "open to the public"?
New medicines must be fully disclosed when they undergo FDA approval, and they always end up completely open because they're patented, and a patent describe the invention/innovation completely. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how it is that countries like India or Brazil manage to copy the very latest in AIDS therapies.
The reason you pay dearly for medicines that haven't fallen in the public domain is because yoy purchase them from the patent holders, which hold a temporary monopoly on said medicines, and therefore make you pay whatever the hell they want, to recoup their development costs and to pay for their villas in Switzerland.
In short, it's nothing to do with being open, and all to do with patents. Wrong Slashdot meme there bubba...
Get The Facts (Score:5, Informative)
Type I diabetes [wikipedia.org] is NOT associated with diet.
This article refers to an autoimmune disease, not a lifestyle induced one.
PubMed abstract (Score:5, Informative)
Noninvasive imaging of pancreatic inflammation and its reversal in type 1 diabetes.
Turvey SE, Swart E, Denis MC, Mahmood U, Benoist C, Weissleder R, Mathis D.
Section on Immunology and Immunogenetics, Joslin Diabetes Center, and Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
A major stumbling block for research on and treatment of type 1 diabetes is the inability to directly, but noninvasively, visualize the lymphocytic/inflammatory lesions in the pancreatic islets. One potential approach to surmounting this impediment is to exploit MRI of magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) to visualize changes in the microvasculature that invariably accompany inflammation. MNP-MRI did indeed detect vascular leakage in association with insulitis in murine models of type 1 diabetes, permitting noninvasive visualization of the inflammatory lesions in vivo in real time. We demonstrate, in proof-of-principle experiments, that this strategy allows one to predict, within 3 days of completing treatment with an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody, which NOD mice with recent-onset diabetes are responding to therapy and may eventually be cured. Importantly, an essentially identical MNP-MRI strategy has previously been used with great success to image lymph node metastases in prostate cancer patients. This success strongly argues for rapid translation of these preclinical observations to prediction and/or stratification of type 1 diabetes and treatment of individuals with the disease; this would provide a crucially needed early predictor of response to therapy.
Re:Linux box (Score:1, Informative)
The MRI system could have run just about any other OS. What difference would it have made if it was a BSD system or a SCO (groan) system? What about OS X? (Though you wouldn't hear the end of the fanboy propaganda on that one).
This isn't about scaling a giant application across 9 thousand processors to deliver record performance.
Re:Get The Facts (Score:1, Informative)
That's a fact, jack.
Re:why not do something to stop it? (Score:2, Informative)
And about saving the taxpayers money, well they are close to a cure for type 1, but since it's underfunded and the stem cell issues it will take far longer than it should. So, you're paying for type 1 treatment right now -- I have to stab my boy's fingers about 15 times a day - those strips are a buck each. Not to mention the 6K pump, hundreds of dollars in consumables for the pump every month, and the much more likely frequent hospital visits.
So, I say pay now or pay later. For the kids with type 1, they'd appreciate it as a taxpayer if you'd invest a little now to save a lot of money for later.
Problem partially solved! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Extremely preminary data (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes, a person's immune system might confuse some viral proteins with the proteins on the pancreatic beta cells (which make insulin). This leads to the immune system attacking the beta cells. Eventually no beta cells are left and a person requires insulin to replace their natural insulin production.
There is nolikely specific infection which causes diabetes. However, some viruses may be more likely to confuse the immune system. Also, your immune system's genetic makeup may predispose it to confusing the virus and the beta cells.
Insulin is required to move glucose from the bloodstream into cells. Without it, the bloodstream glucose level rises until glucose spills out into the urine. In fact, diabetes mellitus is Greek for "sweet urine". Unfortunately, diabetics are literally starving in a sea of food.
Type 1/Type 2 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Informative)
Type 2 diabetes may be helped by some recent research [alertnet.org] announced in July showing a link between insulin resistance and a protein called retinol binding protein 4.
Manipulating levels of this protein in mouse models appeared to alter levels of insulin resistance and provides a new avenue for drug therapy. So even if this MRI study isn't clinically useful at the moment, there are other promising advances that suggest that both type-1 and type-2 will be even more treatable soon :)
Biomedical research as hacking the body (Score:2, Informative)
Now that's a hack, to my mind way better than many others.
The entire pdf of the original article is available free on Biomed Central. Incidentally, resolution is not too important here, so this should work for "low field MRI", which uses ordinary magnets (.01-.1 Tesla), and costs about 10% of ordinary MRI (exclusive of technician and radiologist fees), i.e. a real currently existing "tricorder"