Cure For Diabetes
It is year 2013 and there is still no cure for diabetes, after all the research and discoveries on diabetes, you’d think they would have found the cure by now.
It is estimated that roughly 16 million US citizens– almost 6% of the population have diabetes and it is the cause of more deaths than AIDS and certain cancers.
Diabetes is a chronic disease– type 1 or type 2, if you’re suffering from pain and discomfort of any type, start with making some lifestyle choices, managing your stress levels, keeping your weight normal, taking your medication and visiting your doctor regularly, exercising regularly and eating well- going for healthy and nutritious foods, avoiding empty calorie foods to keep your blood glucose levels under control.
You can alleviate the symptoms of type 2 diabetes with these easy life style choices– like simply losing weight by a proper diet and exercise and live a normal life but things are a bit tougher with type 1 diabetes.. Potential cures on offer come with certain complications.
It is common for weight loss- bariatric surgery patients to quit their type 2 diabetes drugs after they lose weight, but once when they put on their unhealthy weight back, diabetes is back too!
With Islet cell transplant, if you transfer insulin producing cells from a donor’s pancreas into the diabetes patient’s liver, the new cells start releasing insulin into the recipient’s blood, but this is hardly a diabetes cure even though the patient’s quality of life is significantly improved.
It is great help for them to be able to be more flexible with what they eat and prevent other diseases diabetes may lead to such as bone and joint disorders, erectile dysfunction, heart diseases, stroke, kidney disease, nerve, foot and eye damage. The catch is that the diabetes patient still has to take immuno-suppressant drugs with significant side effects to suppress immune response as the recipient’s body perceives the new cells as foreign if they are not genetically identical with the donor. Islet cells are not guaranteed to be accepted by the recipient’s body either. And unfortunately, it turned out to be a temporary solution and a return to insulin was inevitable at the end.
Stem cells may be the answer for type 1 diabetes and a few other fatal and chronic diseases.. Over the past few years, scientists have managed to cure diabetes in rodents by injecting embryonic stem cells into abdominal fat of mice. Stem cells turned into pancreatic cells in their bodies and they started producing insulin two months after the injection. Insulin is a peptide hormone that helps control fat and carb metabolism in the body. Whether this is safe in humans or not is not known yet.
There is not a natural cure for diabetes either so if you meet anyone that claims to have the natural cure for diabetes, keep away. And never use any dietary supplements without first consulting your doctor as they may interact with your diabetes drugs.
Another solution that a few pharmaceutical companies are working on is the artificial pancreas system which the patient wears on their body and the system delivers them with sufficient amounts of insulin by measuring blood sugar as well. Although this is not a cure, it will save on a lot of daily insulin injections.
Exogenous beta cells and other similar cell transplant procedures have been tried scientists but the result is pretty much the same so far: they are fiercely attacked by human immune system.
In February 2013, Autonomous University of Barcelona researchers are probably the ones that came closest to a cure for diabetes so far. They managed to cure dogs’ diabetes with a one session gene therapy. The dogs got their health back after the therapy and no symptoms were seen for over 4 years. The same gene therapy was already tested on rodents too and it is looking promising for at least animals, in case they don’t get the same results with humans.
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