

UK Doctors Cure Type 1 Diabetes 96
ayden writes "The BBC is
reporting that a 61-year-old man has become the first person in the UK to be cured of type 1 diabetes thanks to a groundbreaking cell-transplant technique.
More
info
here."
Whoo hoo!! (Score:3, Funny)
I'm off to 7-Eleven for a Pepsi Super Big Gulp!
Re:Whoo hoo!! (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, so you've decided to pursue Type 2, then, have you? Good luck with that.
Woah, don't drink that yet! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a cure for type I. Type I is what you get as a kid when your body never makes enough insulin. Type II is what you get when you consume so much sugar your body can't produce enough insulin.
Drink that Super Big Gulp and you will add to your chance of getting type II, which isn't covered by this treatment. (Not to mention all the other unhealthy things about soda in general)
Type I == Juvenile Diabetes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Type I == Juvenile Diabetes (Score:2)
Just because 90% of doctors don't care about patients at ALL and are so dense they can't diagnose a common condition with unique, easily testable symptoms before the patient is an adult doesn't mean you should change the name of the disease.
<rant>
If you couldn't tell, I'm bitter. My mom thought I was diabetic the whole time and I went to many many doctors (including a special childr
Re:Type I == Juvenile Diabetes (Score:2)
Not sure about your case, but you do not have Type I diabetes, untreated, for 10 years. Onset of Type I diabetes happens, at most, over a period of months. After that, if untreated, you go into diabetic ketacidosis, and you die. You simply can't have untreated Type I diabetes for years.
Re:Type I == Juvenile Diabetes (Score:2)
And, assuming that's true, that does not imply that the 50% to which you're referring did not suffer before they were 18. It merely implies that they were not diagnosed until they were 18. Which more clearly suggests the reasoning behind my rant.
Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:4, Informative)
It works great and it doesn't harm my septic tank!
Leave it for an hour or overnight and flush in the morning.
Now if pop can do that, imagine what it does inside you!
Pepsi works too.
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:2)
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:2)
They used the stuff with no corn syrup or water added to it. Mostly consists of citric acid in high concentrations.
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah ok. You sure it wasn't a friend of your brother-in-law's uncle's neighbor from down the street?
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:2)
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure stomach acid would work at least as well as a toilet bowl cleaner. Imagine what *that* does inside of you. Oh, wait.
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:1)
If i'm not mistaking, that's clorhidric acid inside us which is pretty nasty stuff. I mean burns your firgerprints alog with your fingers nasty
In my experience i can drink pretty much whatever i want as long as i'm not in any stress. Once I have deadlines and things going wrong, every glass of cola or
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:1)
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:2)
'dunno, but I think MythBusters
just have just busted this myth...
Re:Coca-cola: Toilet bowl cleaner! (Score:2)
Re:Woah, don't drink that yet! (Score:2)
Wrong. That's nothing but an old wive's tale. You get Type II diabetes when your body has trouble keeping your blood sugar at the right level. It's not just insulin, you have problems when it gets too low too, because your body may not react properly and pump some more sugar into your blood. Among other things, Type II diabetes is caused by exposure to Agent Orange. That's why any Viet Nam era veteran with T
Good news! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good news! (Score:5, Insightful)
On a side note, if they can extract the pancreas cells from dead donors, then why do they claim to have a major shortage of them? I imagine that they only need to borrow a small sliver of the dead donor's pancreas and not the whole whopper, so one dead donor can help cure tens, maybe hundreds of afflicted patients? But then again I have no idea how many people in the UK don't mind donating their organs after they're dead. Personally I see no reason not to. Spread the love, share the life! =D
Re:Good news! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good news! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Good news! (Score:5, Informative)
Nipok Nek
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
cheers!
Re:Good news! (Score:2, Informative)
Type I, associated with a death of the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas (due to an autoimmune reaction) can indeed come from Type II diabetes.
What typically happens, is that the first stage of NIDD (non-insulin dependent diabetes) occurs when body tissues become insulin resistant. The levels of insulin increase, as the typical levels don't reduce blood glucose sufficiently (due to a change in insulin receptors. The down-regulation comes in response to overstimulation).
Re:Good news! (Score:1)
I can't give blood, as the effects of giving non-diabetic people blood with artificial insulin are not certain. I assume this means that my organs would not be welcome either. There are a numbe
Re:Good news! (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately not. As reported here http://www.channel4.com/news/2005/03/week_2/09_in
Re:Good news! (Score:3, Insightful)
Society is screwed up. Organ donation should be opt-out, not opt-in.
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
No your wrong simple as that. I do agree that everyone that does not have religious objections should be a opt in. And yes I did. And I told my wife that I want to do it.
Just opting in is not enough. You need to tell your family.
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
Hated Debate Club, eh?
I do agree that everyone that does not have religious objections should be a opt in.
Which religions still prohibit it? Catholics are even jiggy with cremation these days.
Once exception I know of are Christian Scientists, which don't even believe in blood transfusions. I don't see ER's adopting a no-transfusions policy for all John Does in case they may be Christian Scientists.
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
When the government starts assuming permission it is wrong. Do you want an opt out policy for phone taps, searches, or drug testing?
Actually I know some Jewish sects forbid it. Plus I am sure that there are some individuals that have feelings that it is wrong.
Your example of Blood transfusions not a good example. That is a procedure to save the patients life. Organ harvesting involves the termination of the patients life. While I agree that brain dead is as good as dead there are
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
We're trying to be sensitive to religious views here. It may well save the patient's life, but if the patient's beliefs are correct, it may well also damn their immortal soul for all eternity. Point being, they would rather die than be transfused but we don't extend them that courtesy.
Organ harvesting involves the termination of the patients life.
Really? At the hospitals I'm familiar with 5 minutes
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
I can not imagine that would be of much use for heart transplants. I even question that for liver or lung harvesting.
Even if you want to reduce organs to the level of property it is not right to assume that just because the "owner" does not need them anymore that you have the right to take
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
We're in 100% agreement regarding property rights and ownership and there should be nothi
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
You have to admit that sounds really bad. But I am hoping that is not what you meant.
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
That's exactly what I meant. Fewer donations available year after year is exactly the wrong direction. What sounds bad? You think it's good that we have a decreasing number of organs available for transplant? That means more people die waiting for transplant. That public education about the need for organ donations has largely failed?
Are you inferring that I'm advocating more people die in car in car wrecks? Are yo
Re:Good news! (Score:1)
Organ donation should be opt-out, not opt-in.
How exactly would that work? Right now I assume they contact your next of kin and ask what they want to do. If they can't get in touch with your next of kin then I assume they don't allow the donation. Would you want it to work such that if they can't get in touch with your next of kin that they just donate away? Doesn't seem very fair to me. In fact, it'd be rather "screwed up".
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
Well, there's a section of your drivers license that allows organ donations - it could just as easily disallow donations. Failing that, it could be in your advanced directives at the hospital. We're going to have portable electronic medical records very soon, so if they can identify you then can find out.
Failing that, as a John Doe, yes, donate.
Doesn't seem very fair to me. In fact, it'd b
Re:Good news! (Score:1)
Well, there's a section of your drivers license that allows organ donations - it could just as easily disallow donations.
That's not how it works in Florida. You are asked if you want to donate your organs in your application and you check "yes" or "no". I suppose if you checked neither they wouldn't print "organ donor" on your card like they have on mine, but that's really splitting hairs.
It's also rather irrelevant. Once you're dead it doesn't really matter what you wanted to do. I suppose you coul
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
But that's a complex case. The base case is a John Doe in the ED, say he lost his brain in a motorcycle accident, no ID. If he hasn't explicitly consented to organ donation, his organs rot.
Current law/tradition prevents his organs from being donated. In large part this is based on the religious belief that God will raise the Believing Dead at the Rapture and that (somehow) He needs t
Re:Good news! (Score:1)
I'd rather live in a world where "Died Waiting for an Organ Donation" isn't in anyone's epitaph.
As would I, but I don't think you need to change the law to make this happen. We really just need education.
We also need a lot of brain dead people. I'd be interested in knowing just how many useful organs are thrown away in the first place. The vast majority of deaths I would think are cardiac deaths and not brain deaths. And even when there's a brain death of an eligible donor, you've still got to find
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
Who is cheated in that case?
Re:Good news! (Score:1)
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
Re:Good news! (Score:1)
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
for most slashdotters its the only way to pass on genetic code
Re:Good news! (Score:2)
One word... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One word... (Score:2)
Re:One word... (Score:5, Funny)
You must have lived a very insulinated life to make a joke like that.
Re:One word... (Score:1)
This is amazing! (Score:1)
Re:This is amazing! (Score:1)
Restrictions a good thing (Score:2)
Re:Restrictions a good thing (Score:1)
The only drawback (Score:4, Interesting)
If stem cell research continues at the rate it does, even this will be solved when cord blood stored at the patients birth is encouraged to differentiate into Eyelet cells, injected back into the patient years later and begin producing insulin. No rejection problems with your own-tissue-derived cells.
Also, this, as far as I am aware, will not help with Insulin-independent diabetic conditions.
USians, consider writing to your senator to protest Bush policies on Stem cell research. I'm not having a pop at him - fair enough if it's a moral issue to some folks. Just register your opinion with them. It can't hurt.
Re:The only drawback (Score:1)
Now I have to earn Gil to get my organ transplants?
I just finished my Evercrack detox program!
Re:The only drawback (Score:2)
It does nothing to help with Type II diabetes, which you get from a lifetime eating foods for the mouth, and not the body.
Which is why I said: (Score:1)
Diabetic fatties will have to wait on further research into the cellular nature of their disease. When I was at Uni (~3 years ago) they pinpointed the disease to interference in the specific process somewhere between Insulin Receptor recognising Insulin (which went fine) and actual cellular changes as a result of activation and dimerization of IR. It's almost certainly moved on since then, but there
Wrong (Score:1)
Actually, since diabetes is an auto-immune disease, islet cells even from from your own body will be rejected. That's how Type I diabetes happens in the first place: Your immune system identifies your islet cells as invaders and destroys them.
Not necessarily (Score:1)
I'd be interested... (Score:1)
Of course, an approach sometimes used in treating lupus [nih.gov] (see the section "Hematopoietic Stem Cell Therapy for Autoimmune Diseases") could always be used to overcome the autoimmune problem for good - destroy the immune system and repopulate it from scratch. A bit dangerous, though.
Sadly, (Score:1)
The Institution I work at cannot afford much more than ~200 journal subscriptions, and it's a major UK research institute. Nature and its offshoots(like Nature Biochemistry, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Molecular Biology etc. etc. is horrendo
Re:Sadly, (Score:1)
There is PubMed [nih.gov], which includes MEDLINE citations and is free.
Re:The only drawback (Score:2)
The biggest problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
Three? (Score:4, Insightful)
The articles linked only say that this patient received three transplants. Nothing more.
Where is your source for the conclusion that every patient is going to need three transplants?
For all these brief articles tell us, maybe one procedure would be sufficient for a diabetic in better condition; Mr Lane sounded in pretty bad shape (falling into comas on a semi-regular basis) to this here diabetic.
For that matter, where do you get the "1 donated pancreas" == "1 islet cell transplant" equation? That's a mighty big leap to make given these scanty articles.
Re:Three? (Score:1)
However, the news item also mentioned about efforts to develop synthetic islet cells - not sure how that'd work, though.
I listened to TFA, and BBC radio's making a lot of news out of it. Slow day, probably.
Re:The biggest problem... (Score:2)
Organs for everybody!
Re:The biggest problem... (Score:2)
Organs for everybody!
See? Communism has its up-side, after all!
zerg (Score:1)
Hopeful, even though this isn't really new (Score:2, Informative)
Why? This treatment is very complicated, costly, invovles suppressing the immune system (which has its own problems), and has had very limited success in the past. Pancreas transplantations are really nothing new (they've been doing them with bilateral kidney tranpslants for years); what's more novel here is that they've transplanted only the islet cells from the pancreas. The thing is, whatever causes type I diabetes in the first place,
A stunning breakthrough (Score:1)
Seriously, without antibiotics, has there been ANY medical advance in the past 50+ years? The adoption of plastic to improve hygiene?
It will be like the civil war, "He's got a scratch, get my bone saw." Only this time it will be a very *clean* bonesaw...
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, without antibiotics, has there been ANY medical advance in the past 50+ years?
For all intents and purposes, the answer is no.
Of course, the pedant would argue the semantics of the word "medical", and offer up examples like
But if you define "medical breakthrough" as something along the lines of "a chemical [non-mechanical] agent that cures [not just treats the symptoms of] a disease [as opposed to a mechanical injury, like a broken bone, or a blocked artery]", then the hundreds of billions [trillions?] of dollars spent on "medical research" in the post WWII era by the western world has been, for all intents and purposes, an utter and complete waste of money.And if the "cure" for Type I Diabetes described here is nothing more than a partial pancreatic transplant in combination with an aggressive regimen of anti-rejection drugs, then I wouldn't classify it as a "medical" breakthrough - rather, it's just a new surgical technique.
PS: If you [or a loved one] ever get really, really sick, keep in mind that the only person who stands a chance in hell of doing anything beneficial for you is a surgeon, not a medical doctor.
PPS: Antibiotics, the true "medical" breakthrough of the 20th century, are primarily a tool of the surgeon, not the medical doctor.
Re:No. (Score:2)
A surgeon of my acquaintance used to claim that there were only two significant medical advances in the past 200 years: anti-biotics, and sterile technique. To that I would add anesthetic, although that's more of an enabling technology than a cure. The effect of everything else has been tiny in comparison.
Probably the largest "minor" advance was the use of radiation to treat cancer. However, the success rate (60% of patients improve, 40% don't) has not changed significantly since the 50's, when Canadi
Re:No. (Score:2)
The may be the tool of the surgeon, but they are the refuge of the harried pediatrician!
Re:A stunning breakthrough (Score:1, Insightful)
In addition, we could always start looking into the Soviet programmes on bacteriophages. They had large stocks they were developing, and they were quite useful. Bacteriophages are basically viruses that attack bacteria - and will do the job of antibiotics in many cases.
Even with the scares of multiple drug resistant micro
Re:A stunning breakthrough (Score:2)
I've posted a few articles to Slashdot but they've all been rejected.
It's sustainably developed antibiotics!
Good stuff.
Stepping stones (Score:3, Informative)
Like insulin when it first appeared, it was cow and sheep insulin. It wasn't until years later that Humulin was developed (synthetic human insulin to you layman).
This is the first step and assuming it works as well as it appears from this write up, then wholesale cloning of the pancreas tissue will follow.
And for those that think this has no bearing on type II diabetis, you are shortshighted, at best, and wrong at worst. ANY time you cure a related desease, some of it becomes a significant gain to all the other related deseases.
I'm happy even if it only cures Type I. Even though I am a type II, my brother is a type I and it wll probably help him. It's too late for my Mom.
The Beeb got it wrong... this has been done before (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Beeb got it wrong... this has been done bef (Score:1)
And while the Edmonton Protocol is exciting news for diabetics, it's somewhat premature to call this a cure. It requires two harvested pancreases for each transplant, and there were not a huge number of such donations available. I think there was something like 1,
CBC reported the Edmonton Protocol -years- ago... (Score:3, Informative)
Reporting (on Quirks & Quarks sci show)
success rates aproaching 90% from memory,
albeit with some side-effects.
The idea was to transplant islet cells
from a healthy person into the Type 1
sufferer.
People queued for the chance to join the
medical trials around the world.
Then came word that the transplants could
come from pigs, instead of human donors...
So, what's new...?
This is the Edmonton Protocol - not all that new (Score:1)
Re:This is the Edmonton Protocol - not all that ne (Score:1)
Patently false. Stem cell research != fetal stem cell research.
How many times is this ignorant misconception going to be thrown around on Slashdot before people learn to differentiate between the two?