How Old Are You, Really? Telomeres, Biological Age, And Diabetes

How Old Are You, Really? Telomeres, Biological Age, and Diabetes

I consider myself healthier than most women my age. I do a variety of physical activity, eat lots of vegetables and a balanced diet, meditate, and strive to limit the amount of time I sit at my desk. When I heard from a friend that I could learn my biological age, which is different from my chronological age, I had to check it out.
Your chronological age is based on your birth date, but your biological age shows how well your body is aging. In the past, I have taken online quizzes to get an idea of my biological age and whether or not the “lifestyle medicine” that I practice and preach is working. Online quizzes such as this are easy to find with a simple Google search, but most likely not as accurate as telomere testing.
Telomeres are sections of DNA found at each end of a chromosome. Humans have 46 chromosomes in most cells of the body. These chromosomes replicate—or copy themselves—when a cell divides, passing the genetic information they carry to the new cells. Telomeres form a cap that protects the ends of the chromosomes during cell reproduction. As described by Dr. John Axe, you can imagine a telomere as acting like the little plastic tip on a shoelace that prevents the shoelace from fraying. Without telomeres, important DNA could be damaged or lost every time a cell divides.
As we age, telomere length shortens. Two main factors contribute to this shortening. The first is sometimes called the “end replication problem,” which describes the shortening of the DNA strands every time a cell carries out replication. This shortening may account for the loss of a Continue reading

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Cold and Diabetes - Antifreeze in the Blood?

Cold and Diabetes Antifreeze in the Blood?
Homeostasis. Thermoreceptors, thermogenesis, blood-glucose. A lovely vocabulary of regulation. When its cold, you shiver; when its hot, you sweat, and when youre diabetic, you begin to understand the sheer amount of energy it takes to keep a human body at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit all the time.
Now that winters here, its time to explore the mysterious relationship between diabetes and cold weather. Most of the people I know who have Type 1, also have strong opinions about what cold does or doesnt do to ones sugars, but the science behind each opinion remains murky for now.
I can tell you, anecdotally if not scientifically, that the feeling of being cold might mask the feeling of being low . Both feel like a subtle cellular panic, and sometimes when Im out in the cold I dont realize how low I am.
One time in college, I went sledding with my friends. In order to reach the best hill, we had to park on one side of a frozen lake and walk across. Wind-kicked snow swirled around us, reducing, in that wonderful meteorological phrase, visibility. It was probably between 10 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and Id brought a can of Coca-Cola for sugar.
Being from Georgia, I had no idea what cold, serious cold, could do to ones blood glucose level (BGL). Simply by walking across the lake (an eerie and lovely experience, as strangers on ice skates appeared out of the mist and swept past us), my BGL dove to the 40s mg/dl (2.2 mmol/L). Then I realized Id forgotten my coke in the car. My friend had to hurry back over the lake, drive around, and run Continue reading

Minecraft Teaches Kids Type 1 Diabetes

Editors Note: Want to help fund this incredibly inventive tech project to help kinds learn about Type 1 Diabetes, visit here .
When a child is diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, not only is he or she faced with learning new complicated self-care, but theyre also tasked with explaining what it means to have the chronic illness to peers and their community. This often proves to be a challenge and when communication fails, a child can feel even more isolated. Imagine though a way in which a child could teach Type 1 to his or her peers that doesnt include clinical explanations but rather a hands on experience, an opportunity to walk in the newly diagnosed childs shoes. More, what if it were a game, a virtual world in which the peer group was already familiar operating.
Meet the man who designed it Brisbane native Joshua Wulf, a software engineer who worked for Red Hat, the worlds first billion-dollar open-source software company. Hes been programming since he was 10 years old; hes also the father to a son who was diagnosed at age 8. He tells Beyond Type 1 that he stumbled into teaching kids code because he wanted to teach his own son, but the kids were restless after school and didnt want to sit through another lesson. I saw that the kids loved Minecraft [a world-building video game] where they learned long codes to be able to do things and got to collaborate and compete with other children. Its like a sand pit with Lego blocks inside a computer, says Wulf. The kids were already motivated to play the game, so I wondered if we could incorporate learning with it, so we found a Continue reading

Drug for type 2 diabetes provides significant benefits to type 1 diabetic patients

A majority of patients with Type 1 diabetes who were treated with dapagliflozin, a Type 2 diabetes medicine, had a significant decline in their blood sugar levels, according to a new study published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. The results are being presented today by the University at Buffalo researcher who led the study at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Lisbon.
Called DEPICT-1, which stands for Dapagliflozin in Patients with Inadequately Controlled Type 1 diabetes, the 24-week study was the first global multicenter investigation of dapagliflozin to test its efficacy and safety in Type 1 diabetes. The double-blind, randomized, three-arm, phase 3 multicenter study was conducted at 143 sites in 17 countries, including the U.S. It was funded by AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the companies that partnered to develop dapagliflozin.
Participants were 833 patients aged 18-75 who had inadequately controlled blood sugars with a mean baseline hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c)—a measure of sugar in the blood—level of 8.53. A1C levels for Type 1 diabetics are considered optimal when they are under seven.
Adjunct to insulin
The results demonstrate that when this drug, a sodium glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitor (SGLT-2) was administered as an adjunct therapy in addition to the insulin that patients with Type 1 diabetes need to survive, it significantly improved outcomes.
"Our paper provides the initial signal that dapagliflozin is safe and effective in patients with Type 1 diabetes and is a promising adjunct treatment to insulin t Continue reading

Effects of resveratrol on glucose control and insulin sensitivity in subjects with type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis

Effects of resveratrol on glucose control and insulin sensitivity in subjects with type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis
Although the regular consumption of resveratrol has been known to improve glucose homeostasis and reverse insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), the reported results are inconsistent. Thus, we aimed to assess the effects of resveratrol on glycemic control and insulin sensitivity among patients with T2DM. We searched for relevant articles published until June 2017 on PubMed-Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science. Randomized controlled trials in T2DM patients administered with resveratrol as intervention were included. After study selection, quality assessment and data extraction were performed independently by two authors, and STATA and RevMan software were used for statistical analysis. Nine randomized controlled trials involving 283 participants were included. Meta-analysis showed that resveratrol significantly improved the fasting plasma glucose ( 0.29 mmol/l, 95% CI: 0.51, 0.06, p < 0.01) and insulin levels (0.64 U/mL, 95% CI: 0.95, 0.32, p < 0.0001). The drug also reduced homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) index, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure among participants with T2DM. The changes in hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol were negligible. Subgroup analysis comparing the resveratrol supplementation doses of < 100 mg/d versus 100 mg/d revealed a significant difference in fasting plasma gluc Continue reading