Diabetes News:

JDRF Statement on JAMA Article, Northwestern, Sao Paulo
April 14, 2009

While JDRF was not involved with this trial, it does provide some intriguing results that bear further investigation.

The trial, in people, involved taking blood and isolating the stem cells that give rise to blood cells and bone marrow. The patient's immune system was then partially destroyed, and the stem cells returned to develop a new immune system.

The trial results seem to indicate that destroying and restarting the immune system "retrains" or "resets" it without the immune response that caused type 1 diabetes in these patients initially, at least for a period of time. The trial results suggest that when the autoimmune response was interrupted, participants were then apparently able to restore enough insulin-producing beta cells to reduce or even eliminate their insulin requirements. (Some participants in the trial have not had to use insulin for several years.)

While the trial seems to provide proof of concept that the autoimmune response that causes diabetes can be overcome in recent onset diabetes by resetting the immune system, and that in such a setting, islet function can be transiently restored, as with any early clinical trials involving new treatments or procedures, there are a number of issues that will need to be addressed before this approach can become widely available to patients with type 1 diabetes. The risks associated with this highly invasive treatment need to be better quantified, mitigated, and weighed against the benefits of the procedure. What exactly happens in the treatment—whether the immune system is "retrained," or just reset, with the risk of diabetes returning at some point—needs to be better understood. The potential patient universe that could benefit from such a procedure also needs to be outlined (as the trial involved just the recently diagnosed, who may have significant insulin-producing cells remaining). Lastly, the long-term side effects of the procedure have not been fully defined at this time.

 

Health Tip #:001 Benefiting From A Daily Dosage of Aspirin?? May 9, 2007 - A study reported by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the effectiveness of a daily dosage of baby aspirin (81 milligrams) to prevent cardiovascular disease is just as effective as adult aspirin (325 milligrams). Also, a daily dosage of baby aspirin is much less likely to cause the most common adverse side affects - bleeding, primarily gastrointestinal bleeding. Researchers concluded that to minimize side effects, every effort should be made to minimize long-term dosage of aspirin, and they pointed out that the optimal regimen for reducing cardiovascular risk for each individual patient is yet to be determined. Until that time, they recommended that all adults who take daily aspirin for this purpose take no more than the lower dosage.

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Reference: American Diabetes Association:

Reference: American Diabetes Association:

There are 23.6 million children and adults in the US with diabetes -- 5.7 million people are undiagnosed and 57 million have a condition called pre-diabetes.

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