September 6, 2007, 9:45 PM CT

New drug to improve pregnancy outcomes

Women who are obese, have type 2 diabetes or a family history of type 2 diabetes could one day have more successful pregnancies because of a study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

This study, performed in mice, suggests that Metformin, the most usually prescribed anti-diabetes drug, could potentially improve pregnancy outcomes in women with insulin resistance.

We observed that embryos of insulin-resistant mice also have some degree of insulin resistance, and if we correct the insulin resistance in the embryo with this drug, we improve the quality of the embryo, says Kelle Moley, M.D., lead author and professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

The finding, published online in Diabetes, suggests that Metformin could benefit women with type 2 diabetes or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). About 8 percent of women trying to conceive have insulin resistance, Moley says, and even more are suspected to be borderline. In some cases, a family history of type 2 diabetes or being overweight may be the only indication that the patient may be prone to insulin resistance.

Metformin is often given to women with PCOS, an endocrine disorder that affects insulin and results in higher rates of miscarriage. These women often share the same pregnancy complications as women with type 2 diabetes and obesity......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

September 6, 2007, 4:55 AM CT

Right breakfast bread keeps blood sugar

If you eat the right grains for breakfast, such as whole-grain barley or rye, the regulation of your blood sugar is facilitated after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was previously not known that certain whole-grain products have this effect all day. This is due to a combination of low GI (glycemic index) and certain type of indigestible carbohydrates that occur in certain grain products. The findings are presented in a dissertation from the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University. The dissertation shows that even people who have had a breakfast low in GI find it easier to concentrate for the rest of the morning.

Great variations in levels of blood sugar are being associated more and more with the risk of old-age diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases. These findings can therefore provide valuable information for tailoring a new generation of whole-grain products with low GI that can counteract these so-called lifestyle diseases. They may also have a beneficial effect on short-term memory and mental acuity.

It is known that a carbohydrate-rich breakfast with low GI can moderate increases in blood sugar after lunch. But my results show that low GI in combination with the right amount of so-called indigestible carbohydrates, that is, dietary fiber and resistant starch, can keep the blood-sugar level low for up to ten hours, which means until after dinner," says Anne Nilsson, a doctoral student at the Unit for Applied Nutrition and Food Chemistry and author of the dissertation......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

August 28, 2007, 9:22 PM CT

Treating diabetes during pregnancy

Treating diabetes during pregnancy can break the link between gestational diabetes and childhood obesity, as per a Kaiser Permanente study featured in the recent issue of Diabetes Care.

The largest study of its kind, this research shows that the risk of childhood obesity rises in tandem with a pregnant womans blood sugar level and that untreated gestational diabetes nearly doubles a child's risk of becoming obese by age 5 to 7. The study also shows for the first time that by treating women with gestational diabetes, the childs risk of becoming obese is significantly reduced. In fact, children whose moms were treated for gestational diabetes had the same risk for becoming obese as children whose mothers had normal blood sugar levels.

Scientists at Kaiser Permanentes Center for Health Research (CHR) in Portland and Hawaii used the organizations integrated databases to analyze medical records of 9,439 mother-child pairs. The subjects were members of the health plan in Oregon, Washington and Hawaii and gave birth between 1995 and 2000. The authors observed that treating gestational diabetes lowers the child's risk of becoming obese during childhood to the same levels of those pregnant mothers with normal blood sugar levels.

Gestational diabetes, the condition in which pregnancy triggers insulin resistance and raises the womans blood glucose level (hyperglycemia), affects up to 8 percent of pregnant women each year in the United States. The rate of childhood obesity in this country more than doubled in the last two decades, so much so that it is now one the nations fastest growing health conditions. Nearly 7 million overweight and obese children in the United States today will grow up to become overweight or obese adults......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

August 21, 2007, 5:51 PM CT

Discovery of 'sugar sensor' in intestine

Diabetes patients could benefit from new research at the University of Liverpool that has identified a molecule in the intestine that can taste the sugar content of the diet.

Scientists observed that the sweet taste receptor that senses sugar and artificial sweeteners is not only present in the tongue, but also in the intestine. The discovery will open new avenues for the therapy of diabetes and obesity, as well as suggest reasons for why artificially sweetened foods and beverages sometimes fail to result in weight loss.

Researchers have previously shown that the absorption of dietary sugars in the intestine is mediated by a protein a sugar transporter that varies in response to the sugar content of foods. The intestine uses a glucose sensing system to monitor these variations, but until now the nature of this system was unknown.

Professor Soraya Shirazi-Beechey, from the Faculty of Veterinary Science, said: We observed that the sweet taste receptor and the taste protein, gustducin, are present in the taste cells of the gut. These sweet sensing proteins allow humans and animals to detect glucose within the intestine. We discovered that mice missing the gene for either of these proteins were unable to process the production of the intestinal sugar and were therefore unable to regulate the intestinal capacity to absorb dietary sugars......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

July 31, 2007, 9:48 PM CT

Reducing inflammation plays as type 1 diabetes therapy

BOSTON -- Scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have observed that a triple combination treatment consisting of both tolerance-inducing and anti-inflammatory properties is successful in abolishing adverse autoimmunity against insulin-producing cells in a mouse model of Type 1 diabetes.

The findings, which appear in the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week, offer a possible new prototype for therapies to restore normal blood glucose levels in diabetes patients and suggest a previously unrecognized role for inflammation in the disease.

Type 1 diabetes is known to develop as a consequence of autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells, explains senior author Terry Strom, MD, Director of the Transplantation Research Center at BIDMC and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. But in addition to the long-recognized role of T-cell-dependent immune-system-mediated islet destruction, this work reveals for the first time that a form of inflammation in fat and muscle [is also acting to] prevent insulin from disposing blood glucose into tissues that require glucose.

Formerly known as juvenile-onset or insulin-dependent diabetes, Type 1 diabetes develops when the bodys immune cells attack and destroy its own pancreatic beta cells. Without beta cells, the body is unable to produce insulin, a hormone needed to convert glucose into energy. To prevent the development of serious complications, more than 21 million individuals with Type 1 diabetes primarily children and young adults must receive as a number of as three injections of insulin each day......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

July 30, 2007, 8:18 PM CT

Insulin grown in plants relieves diabetes in mice

Capsules of insulin produced in genetically modified lettuce could hold the key to restoring the bodys ability to produce insulin and help millions of Americans who suffer from insulin-dependent diabetes, as per University of Central Florida biomedical researchers.

Professor Henry Daniells research team genetically engineered tobacco plants with the insulin gene and then administered freeze-dried plant cells to five-week-old diabetic mice as a powder for eight weeks. By the end of the study, the diabetic mice had normal blood and urine sugar levels, and their cells were producing normal levels of insulin.

Those results and previous research indicate that insulin capsules could someday be used to prevent diabetes before symptoms appear and treat the disease in its later stages, Daniell said. He has since proposed using lettuce instead of tobacco to produce the insulin because that crop can be produced cheaply and avoids the negative stigma linked to tobacco.

The National Institutes of Health provided $2 million to fund the UCF study. The findings are published in the recent issue of Plant Biotechnology Journal.

Insulin-dependent, or Type 1, diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the bodys immune system attacks and destroys insulin and insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Insulin is a hormone that is needed to convert sugar, starches and other food into energy......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

July 25, 2007, 5:11 AM CT

New Diabetes Toll On New York City

The diabetes epidemic is taking a large and growing toll on New York City, a new Health Department report shows, as death rates, debilitating complications, and hospitalization costs soar. Some 500,000 New Yorkers one out of eight adults have been diagnosed with diabetes. Another 200,000 have diabetes but dont yet know it. The death rate from diabetes rose by 75% between 1990 and 2003.

The new publication, which synthesizes research findings from the past several years, is available at www.nyc.gov/health. In addition to charting the impact of diabetes in NYC, it exposes unacceptable disparities among neighborhoods and racial/ethnic groups.

• New Yorkers in East Harlem, Williamsburg-Bushwick and certain parts of the South Bronx are hospitalized for diabetes at 10 times the rate of people living on the Upper East Side.
• Residents in the most affected areas also die from diabetes at seven times the rate of New Yorkers in the least affected neighborhoods.
• Among racial/ethnic groups, black New Yorkers have the highest death rate from diabetes, dying at three times the rate of white New Yorkers.

Diabetes is hitting the city hard, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, New York City Health Commissioner. Tragically, it is hurting our low-income communities much more than others. With good management, we can prevent devastating complications of diabetes, such as heart disease, blindness, leg amputations and kidney failure......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

July 17, 2007, 10:23 PM CT

Rapid-acting insulin: superiority not proven

There is currently no evidence available of a superiority of rapid-acting insulin analogues over human insulin in the therapy of adult patients with diabetes mellitus type 1. The evidential value and design of studies available so far are inadequate and do not allow conclusions regarding most patient-relevant treatment goals, such as the reduction in long-term complications or overall mortality. Due to the lack of data, the benefit of rapid-acting insulin analogues in children and adolescents is unclear. Eventhough one of the manufacturers conducted long-term comparative studies in this group of patients, it is withholding some of the results. This is the result of the final report of the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) which was published in June 2007 and for which an English-language summary is now available.

The German Federal Joint Committee commissioned IQWiG to compare the benefit of rapid-acting insulin analogues versus human insulin, as well as to compare the benefit of various rapid-acting insulin analogues with each other. IQWiG assessed all 3 rapid-acting insulin analogues approved in Gera number of: insulin aspart (tradename in Gera number of: Novorapid), insulin lispro (tradenames in Gera number of: Humalog, Liprolog), and insulin glulisine (tradename in Gera number of: Apidra)......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

July 16, 2007, 10:21 PM CT

Diabetics experience more complications following trauma

Individuals with diabetes appear to spend more days in the intensive care unit, use more ventilator support and have more complications during hospitalization for trauma than non-diabetics, as per a report in the recent issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Approximately 17 million Americans have diabetes, with one-third remaining undiagnosed, as per background information in the article. These patients develop complications more frequently and do worse after an acute illness than individuals without diabetes. Studies show that diabetics do worse after being hospitalized for stroke, heart attack and heart surgery, but little is known about their outcomes after trauma.

Rehan Ahmad, D.O., and his colleagues at the Penn State College of Medicine and Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Penn., used a statewide database to identify 12,489 patients with diabetes who were hospitalized at 27 trauma centers between 1984 and 2002. They then selected an additional 12,489 patients who were the same age and sex and had the same severity of injury but did not have diabetes for comparison.

There was no difference between the two groups in death rates or length of hospital stay. However, compared with patients who did not have diabetes, patients with diabetes:........ Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source

July 15, 2007, 9:10 PM CT

Gene discovered for type 1 diabetes in children

Pediatrics scientists at The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia and McGill University in Montreal have identified a gene variant that raises a childs risk for type 1 diabetes, formerly called juvenile diabetes. As researchers continue to pinpoint genes contributing to diabetes, they have their eyes on providing a scientific basis for designing better therapys and preventive measures for the disease.

The research adds a new gene and new knowledge to the four genes previously discovered for type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system destroys insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas and makes patients dependent on frequent insulin injections to keep the bodys blood sugar under control. As the project continues, the study team expects to identify additional genes (perhaps as a number of as 15 or 20) thought to interact with each other in the disease.

The study appeared July 15 in an advance online letter in the journal Nature.

The genotyping technology we now have available has revolutionized the way we can ask and answer research questions, said the studys lead author, Hakon Hakonarson, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. Unlike the prior technology, which was quite limited and dealt largely with relatively rare gene variants, we can now detect common genetic variants that are important in large numbers of individuals, and begin to understand how multiple genes interact in complex diseases such as diabetes......... Posted by: Josly2006      Read more         Source