New MRI Technique Can Detect Diabetes

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."

Linux box

[Anonymous Coward]

This once again proves that the OS is unimportant, and only the application matters. Who cares what OS was used to run the program that allowed this development? Certainly not the patients that benefit from it.

http://www.residentcynic.net/ [residentcynic.net]

MRIs gone wild

[sigmaseven]

That's fantastic, but it's going to take a lot of persuasion to get me to go near an MRI willingly after seeing its effect on nearby hospital equipment [simplyphysics.com]. You're only as safe as the stupidest person in the room.

Re:useless!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, they're talking about detecting TYPE I diabetes. Not caused by a sedentary lifestyle, but an autoimmune disease.

Re:useless!!!

[techno-vampire]

Type II isn't caused by a sedintary lifestyle either. I was living an active life, getting lots of exercise when I developed it. I would regularly go out to a mall to walk, not caring that I didn't buy anything, just for the exercise, and I kept that up for the first several years after I was diagnosed. I'm not as active now, but that's because my health isn't good enough right now, and I miss the exercise.

Yay for medicine!

[Boone^]

This is quite the breakthrough, and these things seem to happen out of technology we already have but just haven't used it in the right way. Personally, I'd settle for a cure for cancer being found on a Windows box if it meant saving lives. :(

Dystopia

[philovivero]

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.

Perhaps this wonderful new technology will be used by insurance companies to deny your child insurance before the diabetes could possibly cut into their profit margins?

Sorry. There should be a "cynic" moderation.

Re:All I know is...

[superpulpsicle]

I had a friend who used to research at Mass general hospital years ago. The problem is not the budget. Problem was always "people resources".

MA has one of the highest turn over rates for doctors in the country. Doctors make the same nationwide, they prefer not living in a state with inflated real estate prices and top-10 worst traffic and winters. The influx of student doctors from local colleges overwhelm these hospitals. Which forces any veteran doctor... a teacher. That's 2 jobs in 1.

Re:useless!!!

[techno-vampire]

The way I do it, it does. I go around every level, not stopping to rest if I can help it, and quickly. Also, at that time I was working up two flights. At fifty, I'd go up and down the stairs and watch kids half my age take the elevator and not get there any quicker. As far as the ad homenem comments at the end, they reflect more on you than on me, and show why you're posting as AC. Never did the word "coward" fit so well.

Re:useless!!!

[techno-vampire]

I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but I will say that my doctor considered me to be in good health and getting enough exercise. That's because the mall-walking was only one aspect. I love to walk and never drive anyplace if it's within my walking distance. For me, if it's less than about two miles one way, it's close enough to walk. How far are you willing to walk? Fifty feet?

Re:Open Source Medicine?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's medicine. I don't care if it runs on linux, windows, or monkeys with typewriters. The price of medicine is not related to the OS under the hood. The importance of medicine is not related to the OS under the hood. The availablilty of medicine is not related to the OS under the hood. Something like an MRI scanner costs so much that the OS needed to run a piece of analysis is negligible.

Screw linux. Hoorah for those who can be helped.

Re:MRI

[Sparr0]

Sure, if you have insurance. And if you don't, you're fucked. And if everyone had insurance... then there would be waiting lists.

Re:why not do something to stop it?

[rcolquhoun]

Check these sites, how to prevent and reverse it The above are almost laughable, laughable if some people, too many people didnt actually believe it. Diabetes is not a conspiracy to sell drugs, just a really bad disease. Think about it just for a second, insurance companies pay out millions every year in treating the symptoms of diabetes, you think they are not desparate for a cure? I am a type 1 diabetic have been for 25+ years since i was 3 years old. For my own education i have spent countless hours finding out about the disease. Treatmented with vitamins, i mean really? Vitamins are an order of magnitude or more cheaper than insulins, if it worked you would think it would be a fairly common treatment by now.... - Robert

This creates more questions than it solves

[rc5-ray]

(Disclaimer: I'm a primary care doctor in the USA. I have a few type I diabetics, and many type IIs.)

First, I think it's great that the researchers have demonstrated a potential way to identify pre-clinical type I diabetes. If these patients could be easily identified and the pathologic process halted or reversed, this would be one of the greatest feats ever accomplished in medicine.

However, this approach has several problems. Another poster has already mentioned that health insurance companies could start denying coverage to kids(and adults) who don't have diabetes, but might get it. If you're a health plan administrator, diabetes is a very, very expensive disease and you want to avoid these patients.

(Whether health insurance companies should even be in the business to make a profit is a topic for another debate. Short answer: It's absolutely wrong.)

More importantly, who do you screen with MRI? Do you screen every child at age 5 (or another pre-defined age)? Do you only screen them once? It's true that most type I patients are diagnosed by the early teens, but a significant portion develop the disease in their later teens or twenties. I have a 20 year old patient who was just diagnosed with type I after the birth of her first child. I also had a medical school classmate who was diagnosed while in his residency.

Once you've decided who you'll screen and at what age and interval, how do you pay for it? This cannot be ignored. An abdominal MRI can cost $1-3,000, and you often need to sedate patients because it's quite claustrophobic. If you were to screen every child only once, the cost would skyrocket into billions of dollars almost immediately.

Re:useless!!!

[sessamoid]

Type II isn't caused by a sedintary lifestyle either.

Troll aside, you're incorrectly generalizing your case to the rest of the population, and thus misinforming other people. Obesity does indeed strongly predispose one towards developing Type II diabetes, though it is neither always sufficient nor mandatory. If you are obese, you are at considerably greater risk of developing diabetes than if you were not. Just because you felt like you were getting enough exercise when you developed diabetes doesn't mean that sendentary habits can't cause diabetes in others. Also you never commented on whether you were obese at the time you developed diabetes.

Also, if you're going to accuse someone of attacking you, at least spell the latin correctly.

Magnetic Nanoparticle Imaging

[Viadd]

This new technique is neat because it works at smaller applied magnetic fields, of order a few Gauss (Earth's field is ~1/3 - 1/2 Gauss). This means you don't need big bulky claustrophobic expensive helium-cooled superconducting electromagnets, but can use simpler, cheaper coils.

Basically, you get injected with a bunch of small particles of magnetite, which magnetically saturate at low fields. If you hit an unsaturated particle with a varying magnetic field, its magnetization varies and it gives a signal that can be detected by a readout coil. When the particle is saturated by a few Gauss field, then additional field variation doesn't change the magnetization, and so there isn't much signal out.

By scanning an applied semi-static few-Gauss field, with a gradient so that the field is zero in some region, you can differentially look for signal in the zero region. By scanning this zero region around the body, you can cover the entire body region by region and so build up a 3-D image of where the magnetite particles are.

(This is assuming that this is the same technique as was reported in Nature a few weeks ago.)

Re:Before I experience symptoms

[iamzack]

You can't get Type 1 diabetes from a poor diet. Nice joke though. I'm sure my little brother, who has been taking insulin shots since he was 6 years old, would find it hillarious.

Re:Before I experience symptoms

[NMZNMZNMZ]

That's exactly how I, having TypeI diabetes, feel every time someone makes a lame joke about me eating too much candy as a kid. It pisses me off. As far as medical science can tell (it may have been proven, I don't know), diabetes is a genetic disorder and has nothing to do with diet or living conditions. I like to think I have a relatively healthy lifestyle, and it's very annoying to hear people tell me I had an unhealthy childhood when they clearly know nothing about TypeI diabetes. You don't tell a blind person that they spent too much time looking into the sun as a kid, do you?

I can understand, though, how one could get TypeI and TypeII diabetes confused. The two diseases are completely unrelated aside from the symptoms and, in my opinion, one of them needs to be renamed to eliminate this confusion. For those that don't know, TypeII diabetes can (though not always) be caused by an unhealthy diet or lifestyle.

Excuse me, I have to go stab myself with a hypodermic needle after drinking this glass of orange juice.

Re:MRIs gone wild

[deglr6328]

Oh please, irrational much? You could probably count the number of recorded fatal accidents in the history of MRI on one hand and how many people have had the procedure? Tens of millions, likely. The benefits of having an MRI so vastly outweigh the risks it is not even a tradeoff worth talking about at all.

Anywho, I think that MRI is easily one of the most strangely fantastic technologies of the last 50 years. Its like a bit of the 21st century accidentally fell into the last quarter of the 20th. Think about it. This is a device which you can slide a person into and 15-20 minutes later have high resolution (millimeter scale and now in 3D if necessary) images of any part of the inside of their body, making diagnoses of certain diseases which were impossible before, possible, and doing it without any harm (not even exposure to any ionizing radiation) to the patient at all. The patient feels, smells, tastes, and sees nothing whatsoever during the entire process. It is amazing. If ever there were a technology which met Arthur Clarke's maxim of 'any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic', then this is it!

Re:The size is still flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

Smaller volume = better signal-to-noise.

The signal comes from you. The noise comes from you and all the space around you inside the tube. As a subject/patient/victim you want more space. As a physicist, I want to keep it as tight as I can. We're looking for a small signal in a lot of noise. It's a compromise.