The History Of Diabetes

The History of Diabetes

For 2,000 years diabetes has been recognized as a devastating and deadly disease. In the first century A.D. a Greek, Aretaeus, described the destructive nature of the affliction which he named “diabetes” from the Greek word for “siphon.” Eugene J. Leopold in his text Aretaeus the Cappodacian describes Aretaeus’ diagnosis: “…For fluids do not remain in the body, but use the body only as a channel through which they may flow out. Life lasts only for a time, but not very long. For they urinate with pain and painful is the emaciation. For no essential part of the drink is absorbed by the body while great masses of the flesh are liquefied into urine.”
Physicians in ancient times, like Aretaeus, recognized the symptoms of diabetes but were powerless to effectively treat it. Aretaeus recommended oil of roses, dates, raw quinces, and gruel. And as late as the 17th century, doctors prescribed “gelly of viper’s flesh, broken red coral, sweet almonds, and fresh flowers of blind nettles.”
Early Discoveries-Human Guinea Pigs
In the 17th century a London physician, Dr. Thomas Willis, determined whether his patients had diabetes or not by sampling their urine. If it had a sweet taste he would diagnose them with diabetes mellitus- “honeyed” diabetes. This method of monitoring blood sugars went largely unchanged until the 20th century.
Despite physicians’ valiant efforts to combat diabetes, their patients remained little more than human guinea pigs. In the early 20th century, diabetologists such as Dr. Frederick Allen prescribed low calorie diets-as little as 450 Continue reading

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The Best and Worst Fruits to Eat If You Have Diabetes

Good news for fruit lovers everywhere: eating fresh fruit is associated with a lower risk of diabetes and a lower risk of complications if you already have the disease, according to a new study published in PLOS Medicine.
Featured recipe: Fresh Fruit Salad
If you've been steering clear of fruit because of the sugar content, there's no reason to do so, according to this study. Over a seven-year time period, researchers analyzed the diet and health outcomes of more than 500,000 Chinese adults. The researchers found that higher fruit consumption was not associated with higher blood sugar, even for people with diabetes. Adults who consumed fruit more frequently actually had a lower risk of developing diabetes.
The study only analyzed fresh fruit consumption, not dried fruit or fruit juice, so we turned to a few registered dietitians and certified diabetes educators to clarify the best and worst fruits, appropriate serving sizes, and how many carbohydrates you should get from fruit each day.
First it's important to note that "diabetes care is individualized," says Staci Freeworth, RD, CDE, and professor of nutrition at Bowling Green State University. This is why it is important for people with diabetes to see a certified diabetes educator (CDE). These specialists can break down how many carbohydrates you should be eating each day based on your individual needs and health history.
Best Fruits to Eat
Recipe to Try: Purple Fruit Salad
Whether you have diabetes or not, the consensus from dietitians is the same regarding which fruits are best to eat.
"The best fruits for everyone to Continue reading

CABG Appears Superior to PCI for Patients With Type 1 Diabetes, Multivessel Disease

The observational findings support existing recommendations favoring surgical revascularization in patients with diabetes.
BARCELONA, Spain—Over the long term, patients with type 1 diabetes and multivessel coronary disease fare better with CABG than with PCI, a population-based cohort study suggests.
Those findings, reported by Martin Holzmann, MD, PhD (Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden), at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2017 here and published simultaneously online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, are consistent with both US and European guidelines, which recommend surgical revascularization over PCI in patients with diabetes.
“Our findings indicate that for patients with type 1 diabetes, CABG instead of PCI should be the preferred strategy for multivessel revascularization,” Holzmann said during his presentation.
Even so, he and his colleagues say in the paper that their “findings should be interpreted with some caution because of the observational nature of the study, and maybe more importantly, the large differences in risks in the first year of follow-up, indicating that there were large inherent differences in risk at baseline between the PCI and CABG groups.”
CABG has consistently been shown to improve outcomes over PCI in patients with diabetes—in the BARI and FREEDOM trials and in a subgroup analysis of the SYNTAX trial, for instance. But Holzmann noted that none of those studies has performed subgroup analyses based on the type of diabetes; this could be important when considering the findings because Continue reading

Genetic findings in 'type 1.5' diabetes may shed light on better diagnosis, treatment

Researchers investigating a form of adult-onset diabetes that shares features with the two better-known types of diabetes have discovered genetic influences that may offer clues to more accurate diagnosis and treatment.
Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) is informally called "type 1.5 diabetes" because like type 1 diabetes (T1D), LADA is marked by circulating autoantibodies, an indicator that an overactive immune system is damaging the body's insulin-producing beta cells. But LADA also shares clinical features with type 2 diabetes (T2D), which tends to appear in adulthood. Also, as in T2D, LADA patients do not require insulin treatments when first diagnosed.
A study published April 25 in BMC Medicine uses genetic analysis to show that LADA is closer to T1D than to T2D. "Correctly diagnosing subtypes of diabetes is important, because it affects how physicians manage a patient's disease," said co-study leader Struan F.A. Grant, PhD, a genomics researcher at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). "If patients are misdiagnosed with the wrong type of diabetes, they may not receive the most effective medication."
Grant collaborated with European scientists, led by Richard David Leslie of the University of London, U.K.; and Bernhard O. Boehm, of Ulm University Medical Center, Germany and the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, a joint medical school of Imperial College London and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Occurring when patients cannot produce their own insulin or are unable to properly process the insulin they do produce, diabetes is usually classi Continue reading

Can synthetic biology finally cure the autoimmune disease?

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Type 1 diabetes is a discouraging disease. Despite the availability of synthetic insulin and increasingly sophisticated monitoring technology, it’s still a condition that requires incessant vigilance: Diabetics must constantly track their blood sugar levels and carefully use that information to calibrate drug doses. Even if you manage to do all of that well, bad days remain almost inevitable. Take too much insulin, and you can spiral into a hypoglycemic delirium. Take too little, and your glucose levels will rise, filling the body with dangerous levels of ketones.
Less immediately frustrating—but no less familiar for diabetics—is the state of diabetes research. Possible cures routinely pop up only to fade from view, their benefits never quite surpassing the simple efficacy of an insulin injection. More recently, though, the field of synthetic biology—a hybrid discipline that aims to construct or redesign biological components and systems—has shown the potential to produce a novel set of treatments. The solutions remain speculative, but they do offer cautious reasons for hope.
“Type 1 diabetes, in theory, should be relatively easy to solve. That has been the mantra of researchers for the last 30 years. And I still take insulin every day.”
John Glass, a researcher working on one such new effort, knows how maddening false hope can be, having lived with the disease for decades. “Type 1 diabetes, in theory, should be relatively easy to solve,” he told me over the phone. “That has been the mantra of type 1 diabetes researchers for the Continue reading