Diabetes Research
| We all know that many of the worst winter storms occur in March so we continue to keep the house stocked with fresh food and medications we many need just in case, however we are looking at seed catalogues and looking at our favorite landscaping magazines and nurseries for what’s new and ready to go into the ground. To make sure you are safe; please look at the site for gardening articles in the Exercise section. Let’s begin looking at our headlines and then go on to the Abstracts this month about the effect of parental type 2 diabetes on offspring with type 1 diabetes and PTSD is linked to metabolic syndrome in veterans. By the way if you have questions, please just drop us an e-mail. I, for one am up every day by 4:30 am answering your questions. |
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Pull up to the computer and get that cup of coffee ready because here come the headlines. The February issue of Diabetes Care has an interesting article for you type 2
diabetics which should give impetus to controlling blood glucose levels. Dr. Jeff Williamson of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center found that a 1 percent increase in A1C levels
was associated with slightly lower scores on tests of psychomotor speed, global cognitive function, memory and multi-tasking. On a day to day basis his group suggested that in situations
where education and teaching about diabetes care are part of treatment that professionals understand that patients with higher than normal A1c scores be given more time to absorb and
process information and that they might be counseled to have a family member sit in on sessions periodically to make sure that they are keeping track of managing their diabetes through
monitoring diet, exercise, and medication.
The BBC ported a news article which caught our collective eyes. Six centers in Great Britain are receiving nearly £10 million of government funding to offer transplants of insulin-producing cells. The technique has been used on a handful of patients to reduce the risks of coma-inducing sugar attacks in people with type 1 diabetes. The procedures involve obtaining islet cells from the pancreas of a dead donor and injecting them into the patient’s liver. The major international breakthrough was announced in 2000 in Canada but the first UK transplant was carried out by London’s King’s College Hospital in 2002. It has been used on people at risk of hypoclycemia which can lead to coma. The treatment has been used to give protection from hypoglycemia and some actually have been freed from insulin injections. However, the patients need to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. The government is aiming for up to 20 transplants in the first year before the numbers are gradually built up to about 80. As someone who has written 5 cookbooks, I read the following article twice to make sure I could relate the facts to you in an accurate fashion. Cornell University marketing professor Brain Wansink who directed the study examined classic recipes as published in cookbooks from the 1930’s to the present. In the Joy of Cooking 18 recipes published in all seven editions, 17 increased in calories per serving. That can be attributed partly to a jump in total calories per recipe (about 567 calories), but also to larger portion sizes. Just one example of this is that in 60’s the same size pan and ingredients for brownies was listed as yielding 30 brownies but in the 1997 edition it made 15. The researchers were more concerned the increase in overall calories in recipes which is caused by calories density rather than portion sizes. They see the calorie increases as more insidious because it’s the sort of thing the average person would not notice or even think would have happened over the years. Much of the change can be attributed to money. Relative to household income, food is cheaper than during the 30’s. So recipes once padded with less expensive (and lower calorie) ingredients like beans, now often have more meat, Wansink reports. He suggests that when using modern cookbooks put half of the recipe away for another meal as soon as you make it. Since the portion size is 40% larger than is used to be you gat to cook less frequently. Want another reason to help a friend or family member to stop smoking? Read on. This study headed by Dr Tao He from China. His colleagues examined the individual and combined effects of active smoking, secondhand smoke, and metabolic syndrome on the risks of heart disease and stroke in a survey of elderly Chinese in Beijing. More men reported ever having smoked tobacco, but more women reported secondhand smoke exposure. The rate of metabolic syndrome was 34.8 percent in men and 54.1 percent in women. Analysis showed that the combined effect of smoking and metabolic syndrome on heart disease and stroke was stronger in women than in men. Moreover, only in women was exposure to secondhand smoke associated with these conditions. The authors caution that “It is likely that the growing double epidemics of smoking and metabolic syndrome in China will greatly and rapidly increase the burden of cardiovascular disease from traditional risk factors." “Urgent public health measures and clinical practices should be used to prevent the health hazard from the double epidemics." When our daughter was pregnant we watched with interest the results of her blood glucose tests. I live with diabetes and I would never want to see her live with this disease either type 1 or 2. Her odds were very low because she grew up eating well and exercising but this is my family and I was concerned. A new study reported in USA Today shows that treating mild gestational diabetes cuts in half the risk of delivering an excessively large baby and developing pre-eclampsia, a leading cause of illness and death in mothers and infants. In pregnant while women who are under 25 and not overweight, only about 1% will develop the condition. But the risk increases with a family history of diabetes, previous gestational diabetes, age over 25, obesity and membership in certain ethnic or racial groups—Hispanic, Native American, black or Asian. The results of this study were reported in San Diego at the annual meeting of the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine by Mark Landon, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Landon headed the first large-scale U.S. trial to test whether diagnosing and treating mild gestational diabetes is worthwhile. It involved 958 pregnant women at 15 medical centers, part of the Maternal Fetal Medicine Unit Network, which is funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. About half of the women were randomly assigned to get treated for mild gestational diabetes, while the other half were not. Only 7% of the treatment group needed insulin, the rest of the treatment group controlled their blood sugar with diet and exercise. There were no differences between the groups as far as rates of jaundice or low blood sugar—both of which appear to be more common in babies whose mother’s blood sugar wasn’t well controlled during pregnancy. But only about 6% of the treated women delivered babies who weighed more than 8 pounds, 12 ounces, compared with slightly more than 14% of untreated women. And only 2.5% of the women in the treated group developed pre-eclampsia or serious pregnancy-related high blood pressure, compared with 5.5% in the untreated group. In addition, treated women were about 20% less likely to have a caesarean section—27% VS.34%—and their babies were much less likely to suffer shoulder dystocia in which the shoulder gets stuck in the mother’s pelvis.
Let’s look at the abstracts for this month. Diabetes Care 32:63-68, 2009 has an article titled Effect of Parental Type 2 Diabetes on Offspring with Type 1
Diabetes by Lena M. Thorn, MD et al. The purpose of this study which comes to us from Finland was to study the association between a parental history of type 2 diabetes and the
metabolic profile as well as the presence of the metabolic syndrome and diabetes complications in patients with type 1 diabetes. This is a cross-sectional study design in 1,860 patients
with type 1 diabetes from the Finnish Diabetic Nephropathy (FinnDiane) Study (620 patients and 1,240 age-matched patients without a parental history of type 2 diabetes). Information on
parental history was received from the type 1 diabetic offspring by standardized questionnaire. In BioMed Central Medicine (dol:10.1186/1741-7015-7-1) we found this article titled PTSD Linked to Metabolic Syndrome in Veterans based on research by Pia S. Heppner, PhD and her colleagues of the Veterans Affairs San Diego health Care System research service. The study subjects were mostly male (92%). Their mean age was 51 years; most of them (71%) had served in Vietnam. According to both the CAPS scale and DSM-IV diagnostic criteria, PTSP of at least moderate criteria was present in 55%, while another 24% expressed symptoms at a subthreshold level. An additional 64% had a current or part history of depression. They carried out a logistic regression analysis controlled for age, sex, education, drug and alcohol use/abuse, nicotine use, and current or past diagnosis of MDD. The total CAPS score was a significant predictor of metabolic syndrome, but MDD was not, the authors wrote. “ The importance of the association becomes apparent when one considers the fact that metabolic syndrome has been shown to predict cardiovascular disease—related morbidity and mortality." The authors wrote. Dr. Heppner and her colleagues said that the findings are in line with previous studies in populations vulnerable to PTSD. For example, one study found that metabolic syndrome was three times more likely in police officers with severe PTSD symptoms, compared with officers in the “lowest PTSD severity category" (Int. J. Emerg. Mental health 2006;8:227-37). Still the current study extends the current knowledge of PTSD and diminished health Status according to the authors. BSP |
