Israeli Device Banishes Finger-pricking For Sugar Levels In Diabetes Patients

Israeli device banishes finger-pricking for sugar levels in diabetes patients

Diabetes patients know that one of the greatest challenges in managing the ailment is tracking their blood sugar, or glucose, levels. To do that the only option available today is through the use of standard glucose meters — devices that require multiple finger pricks each day, a painful process.
For years, researchers have been trying to find a noninvasive, quicker and easier way to monitor blood glucose. Even the most advanced devices in use today, like needle sensors, which can track glucose continuously, need to be inserted under the skin every one to two weeks.
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Now, Caesarea-based startup Cnoga Medical Ltd. says it has come up with a way to track blood glucose levels without pricking or pain. Its glucose meter, already approved for use in numerous countries worldwide, uses a camera to provide a diagnosis of blood glucose levels by observing the changing colors of the user’s finger.
During a short training period, the device learns to correlate the user’s skin tone with previous glucose level readings.
The technology got the green light on Monday from one of the world’s leading diabetes specialists, Prof. Andreas Pfützner, MD, PhD, who came to Israel to present the company with his findings after having tested the technology in two clinical studies in Germany.
“The results were surprising,” he told The Times of Israel in a phone interview. Pfützner held two clinical trials at his institute to validate the performance of the technology, and in both studies he found that the medical device performed “with a surprising level of accuracy,” the Continue reading

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Scientists find cure for type 2 diabetes in rodents, don’t know how it works

The cure for type 2 diabetes may be all in your head, a new study in rats and mice suggests.
With a single shot to the brain, researchers can rid rodents of all symptoms of the disease for months. The injection, a relatively low dose of a tissue growth factor protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1), appears to reset powerful neural networks that can control the amount of sugar in the blood.
So far, it’s not completely clear how exactly FGF1 does that, researchers report in Nature Medicine. Early experiments found that FGF1 didn’t appear to lower blood sugar levels in some of the most obvious ways, such as curbing the rodents’ appetite and spurring sustained weight loss. Nevertheless, because FGF1 is naturally present in human brains, as well as those of rodents, researchers are hopeful that the lucky shot may translate into a useful treatment.
If nothing else, the FGF1 finding “unmasks the brain’s inherent capacity to induce sustained diabetes remission,” the authors conclude. But because scientists already have the protocols and know-how to safely deliver FGF1 to human noggins via intranasal routes, moving toward clinical trials seems like a no brainer, they argue.
The authors, led by researchers at the University of Washington, gave FGF1 a crack in animal brain experiments after other studies had seen encouraging results with FGF1’s cousins. Those related growth factors can activate some of the same brain signals as FGF1 and lowered blood sugar levels after brain injections in animals. Yet FGF1 may be a more powerful player in the brain, the authors Continue reading

Team cures diabetes in mice without side effects

A potential cure for Type 1 diabetes looms on the horizon in San Antonio, and the novel approach would also allow Type 2 diabetics to stop insulin shots.
The discovery, made at The University of Texas Health Science Center, now called UT Health San Antonio, increases the types of pancreatic cells that secrete insulin.
UT Health San Antonio researchers have a goal to reach human clinical trials in three years, but to do so they must first test the strategy in large-animal studies, which will cost an estimated $5 million.
Those studies will precede application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Investigational New Drug (IND) approval, Bruno Doiron, Ph.D., a co-inventor, said.
The scientists received a U.S. patent in January, and UT Health San Antonio is spinning out a company to begin commercialization.
The strategy has cured diabetes in mice.
"It worked perfectly," Dr. Doiron, assistant professor of medicine at UT Health, said. "We cured mice for one year without any side effects. That's never been seen. But it's a mouse model, so caution is needed. We want to bring this to large animals that are closer to humans in physiology of the endocrine system."
Ralph DeFronzo, M.D., professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Diabetes at UT Health, is co-inventor on the patent. He described the therapy:
"The pancreas has many other cell types besides beta cells, and our approach is to alter these cells so that they start to secrete insulin, but only in response to glucose [sugar]," he said. "This is basically just like beta cells."
Insulin, which lowers blood sugar, Continue reading

How Do You Get Diabetes? Four Lesser-Known Causes

Eating too many carbohydrates isn’t the only cause of diabetes. Here are four risk factors of type 2 diabetes that you might not know much about.
Do you know if your blood sugar levels are healthy? More than one in three of all Americans have prediabetes — blood sugar levels that are higher than normal but not enough to be classified as type 2 diabetes. Unless they lose weight and exercise more, 15 percent to 30 percent of the prediabetic group will develop type 2 diabetes within five years. In addition, nearly 28 percent of Americans with diabetes don’t know they have the disease, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How do you get diabetes?
The familiar explanation for what causes type 2 diabetes is that you ate too much junk carbohydrates — soda and other sweets, as well as white bread and potatoes — and became too fat, making your body less responsive to insulin, the body chemical that manages blood sugar levels. We now know that although it’s still essential to limit or cut out those foods to maintain your health, other factors also play a role in diabetes.
1. Inflammation heightens the risk of diabetes. Inflammation is your body’s response to a threat. Air pollution, gum disease, a poor diet, and obesity all can create persistent, low-level inflammation in your body.
If you are fat in the middle, it’s especially important to lose weight. Most belly fat is ectopic fat, which secretes inflammatory chemicals and hides in your muscles and liver. Ectopic fat is one reason obese men are about seven times more likely to Continue reading

What Exactly Is the Difference Between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes?

We hear about diabetes all the time, so it’s easy to forget that there are two very different types of the condition. Both involve problems with insulin, but they deviate from there.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease where, in general, people have a complete lack of insulin. People with type 2 diabetes are unable to use their own insulin effectively, either because they don’t make enough or because their cells are resistant to the insulin they do make. (These are the silent signs you might have diabetes.)
“Type 1 is largely a genetic condition, but since not all identical twins get diabetes, we do think that exposure to an additional environmental factor may trigger an immune response that ultimately destroys the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas,” says Sarah Rettinger, MD, board-certified endocrinologist at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California. “On the other hand, type 2 diabetes has a stronger genetic component, caused by a complicated interaction of genes and environment. A person with a first degree relative with type 2 has a 5 to 10 times higher risk of developing the disease than a person the same age and weight without the same family history.”
According to the 2014 National Diabetes Statistics Report, 29.1 million Americans have the disease. Of these people, one in four of them are undiagnosed and unaware of their condition. The prevalence is twice as high in non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native adults than non-Hispanic white adults, and higher in individuals aged 65 and older (1 in 4 Continue reading