diabetes
milhayser | April 30, 2013Dr. Dolittle spent a few days at the Experimental Biology meeting of the American Physiological Society, learning incredible facts about animal adaptability. In the Sunday session, researchers showed that metabolic byproducts called ketones can protect against seizures caused by hyperbaric oxygen therapy, while seal pups, who fast for up to three months once weaned, increase their insulin resistance and become effectively diabetic. Monday taught us that insects lack lungs, instead exchanging gas through tiny valves called spiracles along their abdomen, while a Burmese python, after eating a…
dr. dolittle | April 21, 2013
The Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section held their Scholander Poster competition for young comparative physiologists today! It was exciting to see all of the students present their work.
Here are some of the highlights:
Raffaele Pilla, Dominic P, D'Agostino, Carol S. Landon, and Jay B. Dean from Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. These researchers demonstrated that a ketone body, often thought of as waste products resulting from the use of fats for energy, can have protective effects against seizures caused by exposure to hyperbaric…
esiegel | March 31, 2013"I'm not anybody's judge; I don't know what motivates people to do what they do. But I have a lot of admiration for anybody who can start with absolutely nothing and make a little something out of it." -Wilford Brimley
I've got a lot of respect for the creativity that goes on over the internet, ever since the original Winnie-the-Pooh and Spirit of Christmas videos I saw way back in the 1990s. But unlike the corporatized Harlem Shake, there's a classic from more than seven years ago that keeps spawning new videos: Wilford Brimley's commercials!
Image credit: Liberty Medical.
As I've told…
denialism | February 28, 2013Diet seems to be all over the New York Times this week, with an oversell of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, and now Mark Bittman, everyone's favorite food scold, declaring sugar is the culprit for rising diabetes. His article is based on this interesting new article in PLoS One and begins with this wildly-inaccurate summary:
Sugar is indeed toxic. It may not be the only problem with the Standard American Diet, but it’s fast becoming clear that it’s the major one.
A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates…
dr. dolittle | February 18, 2013 Image of beagle from www.dogbreedinfo.com/beagle.htm
Diabetes is characterized by high blood sugar. The cause of high blood sugar differs for people with type 1 versus type 2 diabetes. For type 1 diabetics, the pancreas produces little or no insulin, the hormone responsible for lowering blood sugar. For type 2 diabetics, tissues in the body are not responsive to insulin, termed insulin resistance, resulting in persistently elevated blood sugar. Muscle tissue is the main site of glucose disposal in the body and therefore, the main site of insulin's action.
Researchers from Universitat…
dr. dolittle | November 30, 2012
Image of a cynomolgus macaque. Image credit: iStockphoto/Anna Yu
Researchers at Amgen in British Columbia and California have developed an antibody called mimAb1 that mimics the properties of fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21). Having a role in regulating fat and glucose metabolism as well as body weight made this particular growth factor a target for the treatment of obesity and diabetes. When administered to obese cynomolgus monkeys, the new antibody promoted significant weight loss as well as decreases in circulating insulin and glucose concentrations during a tolerance test,…
lborkowski | November 29, 2012At the New York Times Well blog, Anahad O'Connor writes about a new study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, is a caution against recent optimism about gastric bypass surgery's ability to combat Type 2 diabetes. David E. Arterburn and his coauthors conducted a retrospective cohort study of 4,434 adults with Type 2 diabetes who underwent gastric bypass surgery between 1995 and 2008. Within five years after surgery, 68.2% of the subjects experienced "an initial complete diabetes remission" -- but then 35.1% of those "remitters" redeveloped diabetes within another five years.
The study…
dr. dolittle | November 14, 2012
Image by He Meng, from Nature News
Bactrian camels thrive in conditions considered harsh by many standards: very dry, cold, high elevations. Researchers now suspect their physiological adaptations of high blood sugar, high salt diets, and increased body fat may have evolved to help the animals cope with their environment. For humans, those symptoms could lead to heart disease, but for the Bactrian camel, they are considered physiological, i.e. totally normal.
A paper published in Nature Communications describes the genomic variations in wild and domesticated Bactrian camels. What they found…
oracknows | June 15, 2012Naturopathy is at least 99% woo. That has to be said at the outset. Naturopaths might brag about all the science they take in naturopathy school, claiming that it's as much as MDs take. Even if that were true, the question is not how many hours of basic science naturopaths take, but rather what's taught in those hours and, more importantly, what's taught in the clinical hours. For instance, given that you can't have naturopathy without homeopathy, it implies that what's taught in basic science classes in naturopathy school allows room for the incredible magical quackery that is homeopathy to…
lborkowski | May 2, 2012I've written before (here and here) about some of the research that's been demonstrating the importance of avoiding long stretches of sedentary time. (The Sedentary Behavior Research Network has proposed that "sedentary" refer to waking time spent sitting or lying down and expending little energy, while "inactive" refer to people with low levels of overall activity, and I'm using those definitions.) Some of us may feel virtuous for meeting CDC's physical activity guidelines through regular workout sessions, but bouts of aerobic exercise can't completely offset the toll of too much time spent…
jhalper | October 4, 2010Feel the need to eat chocolate when under pressure? You might be able to blame it on your genes, specifically a gene in the brain that responds to stress. This gene, when active, brings out your anxiety and as well as bringing about metabolic changes that tell your body to burn sugar, rather than fat. The same metabolic changes reduce insulin sensitivity in muscles, raising sugar levels in the blood, and causing the pancreas to churn out more insulin. According to the Institute scientists who revealed the gene's function, if the constant stress of daily life keeps this gene overworked, the…
tsmith | February 25, 2010Student guest post by Andrew Behan
Type I Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) is a disease most affecting children (previously named juvenile-onset diabetes). However, adults can still develop this life-threatening illness. Research in the genetic arena has provided evidence this disease is partially due to inheritance, leaving a portion of causality yet to be determined. More specifically, a look at certain viruses which attack the beta cells of the pancreas, the cells responsible for producing insulin, have provided new information regarding etiology of T1DM. Some recent research aimed at…
sporte | January 7, 2010Blaine Bettinger has an absolutely wonderful post where he compares his results for type 2 diabetes from 23andMe and DeCODEme.
I really liked his post and I appreciated the way he showed the data from the two companies and elaborated on their interpretation of his genotype and his risk.
Interestingly, his story goes beyond a simple relationship, where one base changes, one amino acid changes, and voila! you've got the disease.
Bettinger describes what happens when there are changes in multiple genes and how those changes can have a cumulative effect on evaluating the risk of developing a…
terrasig | December 10, 2009
As I have said on occasion, the health care insurance reform debate seems to have underestimated the role of the clinically-trained pharmacist in improving care and cutting health care costs. Hands-on community-based drug management models have been operating around the US with far less fanfare than cut-rate prescriptions at Wal-Mart or CVS Caremark.
So I was delighted to learn via Phoenix pharmacist commenter, Michael Guzzo, that El Rio Community Health Center in Tucson, Arizona, was recognized this past summer with a 2009 Pinnacle Award from the American Pharmacists Association (APhA)…
razib | November 23, 2009
In medical news which won't be surprising to anyone, Ethnic Variation in Fat and Lean Body Mass and the Association with Insulin Resistance:
Objective: Our objective was to compare total body fat to lean mass ratio (F:LM) in Aboriginal, Chinese, European, and South Asian individuals with differences in insulin resistance.
...
Results: After adjustment for confounders and at a given body fat, South Asian men had less lean mass than Aboriginal [3.42 kg less; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.55-5.29], Chinese (3.01 kg less; 95% CI = 1.33-4.70), and European (3.57 kg less; 95% CI = 1.82-5.33)…
palmd | April 10, 2009I'm a primary care physician. What I, other internists, pediatricians, and family medicine docs do is prevent and treat common diseases. When we get to diseases that require more specialized care, we refer to our specialist colleagues. There is a movement afoot to broaden the role of naturopaths to make them primary care doctors. The big difference between naturopaths and real primary care physicians (PCPs) is that naturopaths haven't gone to medical school, completed a post-graduate residency program, and taken their specialty boards. Why is this important? If a naturopath wants to be…
palmd | February 23, 2009A while back I wrote about a naturopathic "physician" who was specifically preying on the Latino community. This is troubling for a number of reasons, some of which I mentioned. In my zeal to rant about the quackery, I may have not delved deeply enough into some of the other important issues.
For example, Hispanics have rates of diabetes and stroke well above the white Anglo population. These are conditions for which we have very effective science-based treatment. Proper treatment of high blood pressure in diabetics reduces the rate of heart attack and stroke by 35-50%. Proper foot care,…
palmd | January 21, 2009Nearly a year ago, a young girl was killed by her parents. She was dying of diabetic ketoacidosis, and her parents provided only prayer. They weren't living on some compound under the thrall of some cult leader. They weren't living in a third-world country far from modern medical care. They were living in the middle of Wisconsin, and had access to any care they might need, but while their child suffered, the parents did the equivalent of nothing. This type of situation has been done to death, but since the parents are about to go on trial, let's review the responsibilities of the state…
bleimanb | October 1, 2007Have you ever noticed that your friends who make out with giant poisonous lizards never have diabetes? Now we know why!
As it turns out, gila monsters, a type of large, carnivorous, poisonous lizard native to the Southern U.S. and Northern Mexico have a kind of hormone in their salivary glands called Exendin-4, which causes humans and gila monsters alike to produce extra insulin in response to a rise in blood sugar. The hormone is very similar to a human hormone called GLP-1, only it lasts longer.
Come on in a little closer, baby. I don't bite...
The new drug, a synthetic version of…
grrlscientist | August 11, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, osteocalcin, type 2 diabetes, obesity, bones, medicine
Even though bones seem to be metabolically inactive structures, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, bones are rebuilt constantly through the action of cells known as osteoblasts while old bone is destroyed by other cells known as osteoclasts. Bones also produce red and white blood cells, help maintain blood pH and store calcium. However, exciting new research has shown that bones also act as an endocrine organ. Not only do bones produce a protein hormone, osteocalcin (pictured), that regulates…