Dr. Doug Melton’s group at Harvard, which has made many advances in our understanding of stem cell and beta cell biology over the years, has identified a new hormone, which they called betatrophin, that, when produced by the liver, induces beta cell growth in the islets of the pancreas.
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The staff wanted to follow protocol. They wanted to put sugar in the drip. And they were urging me to disconnect my pump and let the nurses take over. I thought, Hell no. I just changed my site! I adamantly said “No, thank you.” This was before the epidural, so there may have been some grimacing. Read more
Of course, given the opportunity cure type 1 diabetes, to eradicate the condition causing me to take insulin injections twice a day, causing me to black out a few times a year, destroying my fingertips with blood sugar testing, and generally making my life unpleasant and inconvenient on one side of the scale and a living hell on the other, I leapt at it. Read more
I felt a surge of water burst out of my body. I looked down and my pants were soaked. Again, I thought of the movies: Did my water break? I began to cry because I was only 30 weeks pregnant. The roar of fire trucks. Miraculously, my dad was without a scratch. So the paramedics focused on me.
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My diabesties, as we began to call ourselves, were also struggling to manage diabetes in college. The three of us agreed that it was time to take responsibility and to hold each other and ourselves accountable for living healthy lives with diabetes. There was no reason for us to spend so much time feeling guilty, tired, frustrated, and sick. Read more
Even if I tested every hour it wouldn’t guarantee perfection. Sometimes I have to remind myself that a blood sugar of 147 is just a moment. It doesn’t make me a criminal. Read more
Faustman holds that BCG vaccination’s primary role in this case is to induce TNF-a expression, and that TNF-a’s primary role in this case is to kill the defective autoreactive T cells after they have developed, implying that treatment with BCG will only work with patients who are already diabetic.
Faustman put her theory to the test and treated three long-term diabetics with BCG to see whether it would have any effect on their disease status.
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And here’s where things get interesting for a cure-seeking diabetic: when scientists saw that cells were flooding islets with TNF-a, they decided to see what would happen if they changed the levels of TNF-a in mouse pancreases– and they found that changing the levels of TNF-a changes whether a mouse will get diabetes.
Now take a guess: we have a blaring distress signal, TNF-a, that turns on all the cells of the adaptive immune system, and we have a disease that is characterized by adaptive immune cells overreacting and killing the body’s own cells… Read more
Last week, diabetes headlines were dominated by a new study from the Faustman Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, published on Wednesday, August 8th on PLoS One, suggesting that a 90-year-old tuberculosis vaccine called BCG might hold promise for people living with type 1 diabetes. “Human Study Reignites Debate Over Controversial Diabetes ‘Cure,’” wrote Reuters. “Diabetes May Be Reversed By Long-Used Vaccine for TB,” proclaimed Bloomberg news. Read more
In the 1980s, studies demonstrated that suppressing the immune system of people recently diagnosed with T1D reduced their insulin dependence and provided persuasive evidence that T1D is an autoimmune disease. “Back then it wasn’t so clear,” says immunologist Jeffrey Bluestone of the University of California, San Francisco. Read more
