Eideard

There are many reasons to stay properly hydrated, but only recently have scientists begun to consider diabetes prevention one of them. The amount of water you drink can play a role in how your body regulates blood sugar…

The reason: a hormone called vasopressin, which helps regulate water retention.

When the body is dehydrated, vasopressin levels rise, prompting the kidneys to hold onto water. At the same time, the hormone pushes the liver to produce blood sugar, which over time may strain the ability to produce or respond to insulin.

In one of the largest studies to look at the consequences…published last year in Diabetes Care…French scientists tracked more than 3,000 healthy men and women ages 30 to 65 for nearly a decade. All had normal blood sugar levels at the start of the research.

After nine years, about 800 had developed Type 2 diabetes or high blood sugar. But those who consumed the most water, 17 to 34 ounces a day, had a risk roughly 30 percent lower than that of those who drank the least. The researchers controlled for the subjects’ intake of other liquids that could have affected the results, mainly sugary and alcoholic drinks, as well as exercise, weight and other factors affecting health. The researchers did not look at eating habits, something future studies may take into account.

Another study worth expanding. We already have sufficient evidence of the need for controlled, healthy nutrition. Coupled with exercise, folks have a better chance of avoiding this disease. Sufficient water consumption may be one relatively easy victim of our hectic culture to restore to something more appropriate to our evolution.

Ignoring the red-and-white danger sign, Sri Mulyati walks slowly to the train tracks outside Indonesia’s bustling capital, lies down and stretches her body across the rails.

Like the nearly dozen others lined up along the track, the 50-year-old diabetes patient has all but given up on doctors and can’t afford the expensive medicines they prescribe. In her mind, she has only one option left: electric therapy.

“I’ll keep doing this until I’m completely cured,” said Mulyati, twitching visibly as an oncoming passenger train sends an extra rush of current racing through her body.

She leaps from tracks as it approaches and then, after the last carriage rattles slowly by, climbs back into position.

Pseudo-medical treatments are wildly popular in many parts of Asia — where rumors about those miraculously cured after touching a magic stone or eating dung from sacred cows can attract hundreds, sometimes thousands…

Medical experts say there is no evidence lying on the rails does any good…

She turned to train track therapy last year after hearing a rumor about an ethnic Chinese man who was partially paralyzed by a stroke going to the tracks to kill himself, but instead finding himself cured.

It’s a story that’s been told and retold in Indonesia.

Until recently, more than 50 people would show up at the Rawa Buaya tracks every day. But the numbers have dropped since police and the state-run railroad company erected a warning sign and threatened penalties of up to three months in prison or fines of $1,800.

No one has been arrested yet, and none of the participants in train track therapy has died.

Well, not yet.

More than 350 million people in the world now have diabetes, an international study has revealed. The analysis, published online by the Lancet on Saturday, adds several tens of millions to the previous estimate of the number of diabetics and indicates that the disease has become a major global health problem…

The dramatic and disturbing increase is blamed by scientists on the spread of a western-style diet to developing nations, which is causing rising levels of obesity. Researchers also say that increased life expectancy is playing a major role…

“Diabetes … is set to become the single largest burden on world health care systems,” one of the study’s main authors, Professor Majid Ezzati, of Imperial College London, told the Observer…

The study – funded by the World Health Organisation and the Gates Foundation – analysed blood from 2.7 million participants aged 25 and over from across the world over a three-year period…

The team then used advanced statistical methods to estimate prevalence rates among the participants. It was estimated that the number of adults with diabetes was 347 million, more than double the 153 million estimated in 1980 and considerably higher even than a 2009 study that put the number at 285 million…

It was found that in the US glucose levels had risen at more than twice the rate of western Europe over the past three decades. In wealthy nations, diabetes and glucose levels were highest in the US, Malta, New Zealand and Spain, and lowest in the Netherlands, Austria and France…

I’m fond to point out that condemning fast food restaurants because they serve unhealthy food is akin to cautioning people to stay out of grocery stores because they are full of aisles and aisles of cookies and sugary cereals. It’s what you pick to eat, folks. The coronary corollary to this is that if people don’t order it, they won’t sell it.

A Newcastle University team has discovered that Type 2 diabetes can be reversed by an extreme low calorie diet alone…

In an early stage clinical trial of 11 people, funded by Diabetes UK, all reversed their diabetes by drastically cutting their food intake to just 600 calories a day for two months. And three months later, seven remained free of diabetes.

Professor Roy Taylor of Newcastle University who led the study and is also Director of the Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre said …, “This is a radical change in understanding Type 2 diabetes. It will change how we can explain it to people newly diagnosed with the condition. While it has long been believed that someone with Type 2 diabetes will always have the disease, and that it will steadily get worse, we have shown that we can reverse the condition.”…

Under close supervision of a medical team, 11 people who had developed diabetes later in life were put on an extreme diet of just 600 calories a day consisting of liquid diet drinks and non-starchy vegetables. They were matched to a control group of people without diabetes and then monitored over eight weeks…

After just one week, the Newcastle University team found that their pre-breakfast blood sugar levels had returned to normal.

A special MRI scan of their pancreas revealed that the fat levels in the pancreas had returned from an elevated level to normal (from around 8% to 6%). In step with this, the pancreas regained the normal ability to make insulin and as a result, blood sugar after meals steadily improved.

The volunteers were then followed-up three months later. During this time they had returned to eating normally but had received advice on portion size and healthy eating. Of the ten people re-tested, seven remained free of diabetes…

The usual precautions apply: Don’t go putting yourself on a 600 calorie a day diet; don’t make too many assumptions or draw too many conclusions from a single small study; etc. All that said, this is indeed interesting.

Thanks, Tom, for finding the story; and Eid, for letting me steal it.

Jeffrey Lindberg

Diabetes diagnoses are rising at an even faster rate among dogs and cats than their human companions, according to a national analysis of pet health.

The 2011 “State of Pet Health” report is based on data from more than 2.5 million dogs and cats that visited Banfield Pet Hospital facilities in 43 states.

“This kind of data has never been available before,” Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a veterinarian and chief medical officer for the Banfield Pet Hospital chain, based in Portland. “We want to share it with professionals and pet owners.”

Nationally, diabetes rates increased by nearly a third among dogs in the last four years and by 16 percent among cats. It is much more common among cats. By comparison, human diagnoses of diabetes rose 10 percent over the same period.

The surprisingly high incidence of diabetes, he said, stems in part from rising rates of obesity.

“We have increasing obesity in dogs and cats, just like in humans. It’s no mystery how that occurs: overfeeding and lack of exercise.”

Folks continue to feed their pets the same crappy food they eat themselves – and too much of it, just as they do to themselves. And skip on exercising their pets because, after all, you might have to accompany your critter on that walk, right?

Cardiac stem cells — even in elderly and sick patients — could generate new heart muscle and vessel tissue and be used to treat heart failure, according to research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2010.

Scientists surgically removed tissue from the muscular wall of the heart’s chambers in 21 patients. They then isolated and multiplied the cardiac stem cells (CSCs) found there. Most of the patients had ischemic cardiomyopathy (enlarged and weakened muscle due to coronary artery disease). Eleven also had diabetes. The average age of patients was about 65.

“Regardless of the gender or age of the patient, or of diabetes, we were able to isolate in all of them a pool of functional cardiac stem cells that we can potentially use to rescue the decompensated human heart,” said Domenico D’Amario, M.D., Ph.D., author of the study…

The researchers also examined stem cells’ biological properties that would influence their therapeutic value. They found that cells had long telomeres, or “caps,” on their chromosomal ends indicating that expanded CSCs retained a significant growth reserve, although less so in older or diabetic patients…

“Now you have a resident cardiac stem cell that is already programmed to form cardiac muscle, so this cell is already superior to any other cell you can take from other tissues,” said Piero Anversa, M.D., senior author of the study and director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine.

The scientists are encouraged enough to seek larger studies. Just one more direction where the compass of genetics serves as foundation for creative solutions to problems in an aging population.

France’s government warned patients to see their doctor if they took a diabetes drug that is believed to have killed 500 people over three decades before it was banned a year ago.

The alert targets Mediator, a drug for overweight people with diabetes that was also used as an appetite suppressant until it was banned in November 2009 over fears it was linked to heart trouble.

“Our message to all those who took Mediator is that they must see a doctor — particularly those who took it for three months over the past four years,” new Health Minister Xavier Bertrand told a news conference.

Drug safety body Afssaps said in a statement: “Analyses by expert epidemiologists estimate that about 500 deaths could be attributable to benfluorex,” Mediator’s active ingredient, since its launch in France in 1976…

Irene Frachon, a doctor who this year published a study warning about the drug, said “Mediator is responsible for a health disaster”. She added that there was no need to panic, however, estimating that one in 2,000 people who took the drug were at risk of serious ill-effects.

“The health authorities were late in withdrawing this drug despite several alerts” about threats it posed to the heart valves, Frachon told AFP…

A Servier spokesman told AFP four patients had lodged complaints about Mediator since 2009 and that 500 deaths represented a tiny risk compared to the number of people who took the drug.

“But in terms of brand image, it’s disagreeable,” he added.

Oh, well. We can all understand that. Image is so important.

The 10-year-old Human Genome Project has only just begun to bring to fruition its promise to transform medicine…

Francis Collins, who led the U.S. component of the project and is now director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said that although it may seem that the revolution promised with the publication of the first draft in 2000 is slow in coming, many early predictions had been prematurely hyped.

Isn’t that a pundit-based specialty?

Scientists have barely scratched below the surface of the possibilities opened up by having access to the whole human gene map, he said, and when they do, their results will determine the way all people are diagnosed and treated for diseases.

“It’s fair to say that most people have not yet had the experience of having their personal medical care directly affected by the sequencing of the human genome,” Francis told a briefing in London marking the project’s 10-year anniversary.

“So while one might argue that the consequences have not come across in the first 10 years in the most dramatic form that some predictors put forward in the year 2000, I think the predictions … were probably a bit overblown.”

Mike Stratton, another of the project’s founders and now director of Britain’s influential Sanger Institute, pointed to several areas of disease where big medical advances had already come about thanks to the ability to read the map of human life.

Cancer drugs, like so-called BRAF inhibitors for malignant melanoma skin cancers — versions of which are being developed by drugmakers including Switzerland’s Roche and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline — were examples how quickly gene sequencing had given birth to targeted treatments, he said…

The genome founders also noted that scientists had already found more than 800 genetic variants that play a role in risks of common illnesses like heart disease, cancers and diabetes…

“When a truly transformative advance occurs in science, inevitably there will be in the short term an overly optimistic set of predictions,” he said. “But in the long term…the consequences will turn out to have been underestimated. I think that will…be true of the Human Genome Project.

Couldn’t agree more. We always hope for more than just plain good news. In part, let’s face it, because of our mortality.

But, real science requires proofs and testing, peer review and more testing. There is no easy way around sound methods. And, of course, if results aren’t forthcoming quickly enough to satisfy Reality TV and beancounters – whining is the result.

Replacing as little as a third of a daily serving of white rice with an equal amount of brown rice may lower the risk of type 2 diabetes, a study suggests. And replacing white rice with other types of whole grains can cut the risk even more.

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health say their study is the first to look at the relationship between rice intake and diabetes in a U.S. population. The authors based their findings on diet, lifestyle and health information from three studies covering 197,228 health-care workers, 80% of them women.

They found that eating five or more servings of white rice per week was associated with a slightly higher risk of type 2 diabetes than eating less than one serving a month. Eating two or more servings a week of brown rice, however, was associated with slightly lower risk.

The researchers conclude that replacing 50 grams of cooked white rice, equivalent to about a third of a serving, with an equal amount of brown rice seems to cut the risk of type 2 diabetes by 16%. Replacing white rice with other whole grains such as whole wheat and barley appears to lower risk by an estimated 36%, the paper says. The findings were published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The study didn’t prove that eating brown rice cuts the risk of diabetes. And it is possible that brown rice eaters are simply healthier in other ways. But the study’s lead author, Qi Sun, now an instructor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says that researchers adjusted for factors such as physical activity, body mass index and alcohol consumption that might have skewed the results. “After we adjusted for those, you still see an association,” he says…

Dr. Sun says rice intake is increasing in the U.S., but that people are mostly eating white rice. “The message for the public is that they should try to avoid refined carbohydrates, no matter if it’s [in the form of] rice or bread, and replace them with whole grains.”

Let’s face it, brown rice is the safe bet. But I’d be lying if I told you that I don’t indulge in white rice also, simply because I enjoy it.

A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have discovered a direct link between insulin — a hormone long associated with metabolism and metabolic disorders such as diabetes — and core body temperature. While much research has been conducted on insulin since its discovery in the 1920s, this is the first time the hormone has been connected to the fundamental process of temperature regulation…

The scientists found that when insulin was injected directly into a specific area of the brain in rodents, core body temperature rose, metabolism increased, and brown adipose (fat) tissue was activated to release heat. The research team also found that these effects were dose-dependent — up to a point, the more insulin, the more these metabolic measures rose.

“Scientists have known for many years that insulin is involved in glucose regulation in tissues outside the brain,” said neurobiologist Manuel Sanchez-Alavez… “The connection to temperature regulation in the brain is new.”

In addition to suggesting a fresh perspective on diseases such as diabetes that involve the disruption of insulin pathways, the study adds to our understanding of core body temperature — the temperature of those parts of the body containing vital organs, namely the trunk and the head. Normally, core body temperature stays within a narrow range so that key enzymatic reactions can occur. When core body temperature goes outside this range for prolonged periods — higher as in fever, or lower as in hypothermia — the result is harm to the body…

“Our paper highlights the possibility that differences in core temperature may play a role in obesity and may represent a therapeutic area in future drug design,” added Olivia Osborn.

Bravo!