Health News

Are You Overweight but Do Not Have a Diabetes Diagnosis?

If patients with pre-diabetes lose between 5 and 7% of their weight and they exercise half an hour every day, five days a week, the risk to develop diabetes type 2 mellitus can be lowered by 60% in 3 years.

A road to avoid
If patients with pre-diabetes lose between 5 and 7% of their weight and they exercise half an hour every day, five days a week, the risk for developing diabetes type 2 Mellitus can be lowered by 60 percent in 3 years.

In Part I of these two articles I indicated that obesity is the major risk factor for Diabetes Type 2, also known as Diabetes Mellitus. To understand how obesity can take you to a diagnosis of diabetes type 2, let us check a few facts.

The first thing you need to be aware of is that obesity is what ignites the spark. The extra fat accumulated in your fat cells releases cytokines, a kind of proteins that cause inflammation. In particular, the abdominal fat and the one found around your internal organs such as the liver, the heart, etc, are the ones associated with inflammation, indicates Dr. Brent Wisse at the Department of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle.

According to Dr. Wisse, the cells that form the fat tissue secrete a number of molecules that seem to send signals to your body parts; these molecules start the inflammatory process. These signals in turn cause resistance to insulin, a state where the glucose in the blood cannot get into the cells. Therefore, inflammation within your fat tissue may be a first step which results in diabetes and atherosclerosis.

As you can see, there is a relationship between obesity, the inflammatory process, and the appearance of resistance to insulin. These three factors are associated with a risk increase for developing diabetes type 2 or diabetes mellitus.

As insulin resistance increases, your body cells panic because they are not getting their food, glucose, and thinking the problem is not enough insulin in the blood, they call the pancreas to produce more, so that glucose can enter the cells. Obediently, the pancreas releases more insulin into the blood which does no good because the fat cells refuse to let glucose enter. Eventually, these irregularities cause the glucose level in the blood to go up after meals although at this stage it still remains normal before meals.

All this commotion causes the general level of glucose in the blood to go up little by little. Finally the pancreas gets exhausted with this back and forth glucose business and can not produce enough insulin to keep the glucose in the blood within normal levels. Of course, this process does not happen overnight; it may take between 5 and 10 years in an adult and the end result is pre-diabetes. The same process goes much faster in children.

When the pancreas cannot satisfy the demand for insulin, glucose in the blood will reach levels where your doctor will diagnose diabetes type 2. At this point, patients need oral medication to lower the glucose in the blood, help the system to release more insulin, and reduce insulin resistance.

With time, the production of insulin decreases even more and many patients with diabetes type 2 need insulin shots to control glucose. If the resistance to insulin continues for a long time, oral medication plus insulin shots could be necessary.

As you may also know, diabetes can lead to heart and kidney complications as well as nerve damage in the legs and the eyes. Most patients with diabetes die of heart attacks, a powerful reason to follow a balance diet that protects your heart.

Conclusion
I hope your understanding of how obesity can lead to diabetes mellitus type 2 helps you take the necessary measures to prevent this terrible disease. And if you are serious about losing weight, please, don’t embark in a crazy diet that offers you miracles in a few weeks because chances are it may not be a healthy diet and you will get those lost pounds back quite soon. Get yourself acquainted with the sound principles of healthy diets available to you. A good alternative is a Mediterranean diet since throughout many centuries this diet has protected the people of the Mediterranean basin from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and many other chronic diseases.

Stem cells based therapies for diabetes

Achieving normal glycaemia is the goal of all diabetes therapy.

Potentially, there are many ways to achieve this goal, including transplantation of cells exhibiting glucose-responsive insulin secretion. However, to be applicable to the large number of people who might benefit from stem cells replacement, an unlimited supply of stem cells must be found. Those cells can then be stored by using a cord blood bank or stem cells bank.
To address this problem, cell lines from human endocrine pancreas have been developed.

In one case, a cell line has been developed from human islets that can be induced under some circumstances to differentiate into functional stem cells exhibiting appropriate glucose-responsive insulin secretion. Inducing differentiation is complex, requiring the activation of multiple signalling pathways, including those downstream of those involved in cell-cell contact and the glucagon-like peptide receptor. In addition, transfer of the PDX gene is also necessary to render the cells competent for differentiation. However, it is clear that many other genes are involved in maintaining the commitment of stem cells towards the cell lineage. Understanding the complement of genes required to establish and maintain a stem cell lineage commitment would be enormously helpful in efforts to develop a cell line that can be used for stem cells replacement therapies.

Here, we provide further information on the characteristics of cell lines that we have developed from the human pancreas that are relevant to the development of a stem cell replacement therapy for diabetes.

The recent explosion of interest in cell replacement therapies for diabetes has been driven primarily by the dramatic progress in allogeneic islet cell transplantation. For the first time, the Edmonton group demonstrated that islet transplantation is a viable therapy for diabetes. This advance was dependent largely on progress in immunosuppressive drug therapy that allowed for a steroid-free regimen. Further advances in this area are likely to result in even better long term results as there is evidence that even the current improved drug regimens are toxic to stem cells, albeit to a lesser extent than the previous steroid containing regimens.

While the success of the Edmonton trial was an important proof of principle, it did not address the major problem with islet transplantation, that is, the grossly inadequate supply of cadaveric pancreas as a source of islets. Solving this problem has been a major focus of research in stem cells biology.
Many different potential sources of cells for stem cells replacement, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, are being studied.