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Medicine

New Treatment Stops Type II Diabetes 253

multicsfan writes Researchers have found that an injection of protein FGF1 stops weight induced diabetes in mice, with no apparent side effects. However, the cure only lasts 2 days at a time. Future research and human trials are needed to better understand and create a working drug. From the story: "The team found that sustained treatment with the protein doesn't merely keep blood sugar under control, but also reverses insulin insensitivity, the underlying physiological cause of diabetes. Equally exciting, the newly developed treatment doesn't result in side effects common to most current diabetes treatments."
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New Treatment Stops Type II Diabetes

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  • by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:40PM (#47480197) Journal

    It's called eating well, exercising and losing a significant amount of weight.
    I know, I came very very close to having it. Break the sugar addiction, quadruple your vegetable intake, vastly reduce your sugar / heavy foods intake and do a little, tiny bit of basic light exercise.

    In a couple of years, guess what,...?

    • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:53PM (#47480227)

      Sorry but what you say here is a load of crap. Actually no I'm not sorry, it's just a load of crap said by somebody who doesn't know shit about the condition and just wants to find any old reason to attack their eating habits.

      Insulin resistance doesn't magically get cured by eating right and exercising. Yes, you can much better manage the symptoms that way, but ultimately they don't go away. At the end of the day you still have to watch your glycemic load, which doesn't necessarily come from sugary foods. In fact several vegetables can cause hyperglycemia in diabetics. Pretty much the only way to avoid that in most cases is to eat so little that you aren't meeting your daily caloric needs, which means you'd need to starve yourself to death in order to avoid taking insulin.

      I don't have diabetes, but I've been way overweight (at one point I weighed 290 pounds) and all of the blood tests I took indicated I was nowhere near being diabetic even at THAT time. Yet many other people who have a much lower BMI than I do even right now (I currently weigh 215) and are even younger than I am have type 2 diabetes. The added weight just makes it that much harder for your body to meet its own insulin needs, so losing weight can help manage the symptoms (and in certain cases eliminate them until your later years in life,) but it will never cure it.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Friday July 18, 2014 @12:36AM (#47480367)

          Surprisingly, I also have very low blood cholesterol levels -- many physically fit people with healthy eating habits have several times higher levels.

          Yeah; your cholesterol levels are controlled by your liver. GGP comes off to me as being a dietary fanatic, the likes of which I've seen all too often, and they're kind of annoying because they play armchair general about what everybody shall and shall not eat, meanwhile their knowledge of biology and chemistry tends to be really bad, just like GGP's appears to be (or at least, a very VERY bad understanding of what diabetes is.) I remember one dietary fanatic telling me how his cholesterol was high, so he decided to become a vegetarian. I don't know whether or not he solved that problem, but if he did the vegetarian diet had very little to do with it, but he's just going on being smug anyways. (In fact the Harvard Study vegetarians frequently cite about read meat being "bad" doesn't actually suggest this, instead it shows a link between people with uncontrolled diets and various diseases...but interestingly it also suggests a link between vegetarian diets and high cholesterol, which they never acknowledge.)

          In fact, in recent years we've found that dietary cholesterol has very little impact on blood cholesterol, and may even have no impact at all. What we have found to influence it is saturated fats; less of them will reduce your blood cholesterol. More unsaturated fats will also reduce it (i.e. omega-3.) Exercise also effects it. However dietary changes and exercise have been only found to reduce blood cholesterol by about 30% in the best case scenarios. Beyond that, statin therapy is very effective. People who claim to be "naturalists" (ironically none of them can seem to even agree what the word "natural" means) often tell me how I shouldn't be taking these pills, but I take lovastatin and as a result my cholesterol levels are well within normal range whereas before that and my triglycerides were really high (typically tryglicerides are high when you take in too many calories, which given I am losing weight rather quickly rather quickly, that simply can't be the case; the liver doing something it isn't supposed to be doing however would explain it perfectly.) No side effects either.

          GGP types also tend to be those anti-GMO, pro organic extremists, which are even more annoying because at the end of the day there is zero conclusive evidence against GMO, and zero evidence that suggests organic is in any way better than anything else (but it certainly costs more!)

          Anywho, being overweight in general isn't a good thing, but if you don't have hypertension and some of the other issues that go along with it, you aren't really in danger of anything bad happening any time soon. The main reason I had to lose weight was due to reduced renal function, which was caused by another unrelated problem related to the immune system (specifically, IGAn, which nobody has ever been able to identify the cause of, and it isn't any more prevalent in overweight people than anybody else.) However reduced weight means reduced body mass, which means reduced need for filtration.

          • "Yeah; your cholesterol levels are controlled by your liver." Very much this. I am chubby pack a day smoker while also being sedentary and drinking ~400 ml plus of hard liquor a day. My cholersterol is great though. Ninetieth percentile on LDL's and low HDL and VHDL cholesterol. It is a situation where people don't get to roll their own dice as much as the shills would have them imagine so.
        • by Jesrad ( 716567 )

          Careful here, a low cholesterol level is associated with high CHD risk. The ~15% of people with the lowest total cholesterol (165 mg / L IIRC) account for ~40% of the heart attack deaths, that's quite an over-representation.

      • by satuon ( 1822492 )

        Insulin resistance doesn't magically get cured by eating right and exercising.

        That's true, eating right and exercising prevent you from getting it in the first place. But once you've gotten it, they can't undo it, it's too late by then.

      • Pretty much the only way to avoid that in most cases is to eat so little that you aren't meeting your daily caloric needs, which means you'd need to starve yourself to death in order to avoid taking insulin.

        Well that's certainly not true. You can eat plenty of meat, eggs, spinach, broccoli, olive oil and much much more.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:54PM (#47480229)
      Fuck you. I bench 285, run 6:25 mile, have 11% body fat, and have been a Type II diabetic since I was 9. Fuck you for shaming people with metabolic disorder.
      • I'm pretty fit myself, not particularly overweight, an avid motorcyclist (light exercise for many hours at a time) and I'm good with the foods. I'm in my 60's, too. I have Type II. The symptoms can be managed, but I don't particularly enjoy the method. And shaming people for conditions they can't help is not what kind people do.

        If they come up with something better than Metaformin, I'm in.

      • Thank you. I stopped just saying "Fuck you" to the idiots who want to bash diabetics, because it seems to turn the few who aren't just looking to boost their own egos off to learning, and I want to reach every one that can be reached, but I'm in fundamental agreement. I didn't start having symptoms until my early forties, and am nearly 60 now, but I think I understand (see my post above if you want).
        You see something from someone on the internet who doesn't have the genes

      • by cdrudge ( 68377 )

        Fuck him too. I weigh 285. I can walk a 6:25 1/4 mile. I have 11% that probably isn't body fat. And I have been a Type II diabetic probably for the last 9 years. Fuck him for shaming people with a disorder period, regardless of the type.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:57PM (#47480231)

      Actually, it prevents MOST instances of Type II BEFORE you end up with a broken endocrine system. Once you pass a certain threshold, however, you're broken, and diet and exercise can help you not need meds, but you're STILL a Type II Diabetic.

      This appears to undo part of the damage done- which is a step in the right direction.

    • by Jesrad ( 716567 ) on Friday July 18, 2014 @02:01AM (#47480597) Journal

      exercising and losing a significant amount of weight.

      Nope. [nih.gov]

    • That's a good approach for many. However, for the 25% of men who suffer from low testosterone- it's not as effective. Just like women can get gestational diabetes, men can get diabetes from other causes (including low T) and all the dieting and vegetabling in the world won't help.

      Likewise, if you come from certain racial backgrounds- the diet approach isn't nearly as effective.

      However- a healthy diet is good for other things (heart disease for one- subject to the same limitations of course).

      Healthy food d

    • by Jethro ( 14165 )

      That's actually not a cure. It's a treatment, and it works, but it's not a cure.

      I started doing that about 7 years ago. I was never obese, but I was overweight and I ate a lot (and I mean a LOT) of crap.

      So, I stopped eating crap, and started getting a lot more exercise. I didn't lose any weight but I lost a whole lot of fat. My A1C last check was 6.1, and my glucose levels tend to be normal... but.

      If I go eat a pizza right now, my blood sugar will still spike. It probably won't go a LOT above 200, but it wi

    • by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Friday July 18, 2014 @06:10AM (#47481235)

      It's called eating well, exercising and losing a significant amount of weight.
      I know, I came very very close to having it. Break the sugar addiction, quadruple your vegetable intake, vastly reduce your sugar / heavy foods intake and do a little, tiny bit of basic light exercise.

      In a couple of years, guess what,...?

      Watch this: https://www.ted.com/talks/pete... [ted.com]
      Get some compassion.

    • In a couple of years, guess what,...?

      What?????

    • From a public health perspective: who cares? T2 Diabetes rates are still going up [indiana.edu], yet we've known that for a long time. We need to keep telling obese people with T2 diabetes to lose it, obviously diabetes isn't the only problem associated with obesity, and that drives up costs for the public at large, but telling the public to diet isn't working.

      You individually, great, pat yourself on the back, but you're not most people. We know empirically that most overweight people will stay overweight, and d
  • by nbritton ( 823086 ) on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:49PM (#47480215)

    Remember the movie wall-e? All those fat people on the ship, we're going to end up like them if we don't tackle the root problem. A cure for type II diabetes is great and all, but it does nothing to solve the root problem(s).

    • Remember the movie wall-e? All those fat people on the ship, we're going to end up like them if we don't tackle the root problem. A cure for type II diabetes is great and all, but it does nothing to solve the root problem(s).

      This is an echo-chamber response: someone on the internet heard something, and keeps repeating it. It's rooted in emotional superiority, and comes from someone with no background in scientific research or statistics.

      All attempts to pin obesity on the "that sounds about right" reasons have failed, including exercise and food intake - for both amounts and types of food.

      In particular, lab animals grown today are fatter than the ones grown decades ago, despite having the same (and well-documented) diets and exe

      • For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.
      • Environment definitely plays a role. Genes play directly into that, mainly as an adaptation to that environment. Is already well known that if you have relatives with diabetes (of any type) you are more likely to have it, but also statisticians found that Caucasians are least likely to have it, with Asian being higher than most, and Native American (who happen to be mongoloid, just like Asians) having by far the greatest chance of developing it.

        And, as recent research turns out, diabetes isn't new to Native

      • People show measurable levels of over a hundred chemical compounds (including rocket fuel) which they didn't have 50 years ago.

        My bet is on psuedo estrogens given the symptoms.

  • by thorndt ( 814642 ) on Friday July 18, 2014 @12:31AM (#47480347)

    Just to level-set everybody.

    http://www.mayoclinic.org/dise... [mayoclinic.org]

  • by Nightlight3 ( 248096 ) on Friday July 18, 2014 @12:34AM (#47480359)

    As always when a new miracle medicine is hailed in the media, I check the effects of the ancient medicinal plant, tobacco on the same biochemical mechanisms, and it didn't disappoint this time either -- as shown in this paper [wiley.com] (pdf), it boosts the same Fibroblast Growth Factor-1 by 50% (nicotine will do as well in this case).

  • As a T2 Diabetic for some number of years, I have tried just about every other treatment. Some work. Most don't The cheap ones don't anyway.

  • Very good news. Extremely low calorie diets [theguardian.com] also look promising, worth a try.
  • Finally, hope for the most vulnerable among us, the children!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Friday July 18, 2014 @05:33AM (#47481139)

    [ I speak as an older programmer, with plenty of diabetic acquaintances and family. ]

    I'm afraid there are plenty of Type 2 diabetics whose weight gain was _triggered_ or at least ballooned, under the influence of Type 2 diabetes. The insulin resistance can also cause high insulin levels, which triggers hunger. The spiral of high insulin levels and weight gain can get out of hand very quickly. The result is that people believe that the weight gain triggered the Type 2, not the reverse, especially as the early symptoms are quite modest and only show up with regular blood testing or a glucose tolerance test. It also makes treatment quite difficult, since lapses can leave the victims feeling surprisingly hungry and eager to break their treatment regimes.

    There are certainly millions of Type 2 diabetics who'd welcome a much simpler treatment approach: the oral medications do have complications. Injections are awkward, but there are certainly millions of Type 1 diabetics who absolutely need frequent insulin injections or insulin pumps who will say "get over it".

  • ... granted my understanding is that weight induced diabetes is a self-inflicted wound. Poor diet, no exercise, and it all catches up. But this technology is a money maker for someone, I'm probably just jealous.

    • by Livius ( 318358 )

      Type 2 diabetes is 90% (or so) self-inflicted. Do you deny a remedy to the 10% innocent victims because of the weakness of character of the 90%?

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