Question
Is diabetes curable?
I would like to know whether a proper cure for Diabetes Type I and II is going to be reality in coming years. As I can see we have genome sequence, we have identified gene, SNPs in the gene and then proteins which are switched on or off due to this. What else is needed to find a cure. Or is it as they say "There is cure but no one wants to kill the golden goose"
All Answers (50)
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Hi Anil
You have raised a very valid point.....but still hope is alive...so many things are going on as far as research on this disease is concerned....and a lot needs to be done before any treatment is finally out for general use...as we all know that genomes being sequenced, getting SNPs and even subsequently much more in depth analysis...may not be able to answer all the queries.....life of any organim is hihgly complex.....Even in model organism like E.coli....which was sequenced a long ago...a large number of genes are still there in the genome with 'no assigned function'.....and situation becomes more complex with entry of newer 'candidates'....and a good example is small RNA based gene regulation....life is definitely complex.....
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Deciphering of human genome yielded no immediate solution(s) to many of our health concerns. That's why the focus currently is on functional genomics. Let us be optimistic about a permanent solution to both type I & Type II diabetes mellitus. What is needed is exploration of other indigenous systems of medicine which are in practice in around the globe. Indian ayurvedic system is endowed with permanent anti-diabetic solutions. More focus and research is needed of course. -
If there is any permanent anti diabetic solution in Ayurveda kindly let me know -
@ Dr Ravi Sharma. Sir, if possible I would also like to take guidance from you about which Ayurveda medicine to be taken for curing diabetes. Or if possible kindly give me the name of the practitioner so that I can contact him. thanks and regards
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I agree with Dr. Ravi Sharma, there are ayurvedic preparations which are highly promising and wholistic in approach. Two of them are currently being validated and if proved successful, it will be a big boon for type II diabetics.
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Kindly give me the name so that i can try it on myself
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Yes i am type 2 and will be happy to try the ayurvedic medicine
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Thank you Dr Ravi Sharma for the help. I will send mail on your account for further guidance
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@Dr Sharma
What about type I diabetes? Is there any progress approved? please let me know more.
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@Ebrahim . yesterday I read somewhere that stem cell treatment in mice for Type 1 has been successful. Dont know much
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As I have read diabetes have been reported from India since 2000 years back in the ancient medical treatise and I am sure some people who still work on ancient medicine system may be having cure for that. But alas the pharma companies may not allow anyone to publicise that since they will be loosing their precious dollars. Anyway I am sure with the current progress in diabetes research something good will come
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@Dear Anil As I know, and I was in a meeting where some patients been presented had been cured by an infusion of cell line. The cure outcome was between zero and 100% (Insulin injection off). I mean that not merely in mice but in human the stem cell (or here cell lines) have been in some extent successful.
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It is really nice to know that one day Diabetes 1 people will be able to live a normal life.
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Preparation, process and a regenerative method and technique for prevention, treatment and glycemic control of diabetes mellitus . Today saw this patent on diabetes.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8197864.html -
yes diabetes I and II and be easiely cured and drug diabetes therapy is nuderway soon. The approach is cell physiology for insulin secretion due to Glu. simulation as I did with B.C. and his group in biophysics during 2006 to 2010. -
Dear Dr. Ravi Sharna
I am in process of getting drug iadetes therapy based on my proposal to Dr. Nokia Shoko Chance in Nov. 2010. Since then I collaborated with my professors whrer I did my doctoral thehis with William Fulbright Educational Missions. I will contact you by email and I may be inscientific visit to philadelphia and other places so I may giive some works
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@Dr Ravi I am also waiting for your magic potion. Hope I will also be a lucky guy to try your herbal formulation to get rid of this disorder.
@Hanii I would like to know more about this drug diabetes therapy -
@Nathan Hill. An RCT requires considerable resources. Most effective drugs are based on somebody's home brewed herbal remedy. I am controlling my T2DM and reversing complications using an extract from a red mold. Erythomycin is effective against C. novyi type A the alpha toxin of which is capable of causing T2DM and all its complications via its effect on the hexamine signalling pathways.(check the literature it is all there though some evidence goes back to the 1940's) Maybe some of these herbal remedies are effective anti-clostridal agents. Maybe they stimulate an immune response to the organism? If we do the scientific thing and collected all the data on these claims and looked for patterns we might find some answers.
Unless you have some unpublished knowledge about the causes and the mechanisms of diabetes all you have is the half truths and speculation found in the literature. Since we don't know, it is unscientific to reject any piece of information when we have no way of evaluating it.
Perhaps Ravi could tell us what herbs and what dosage and anyone else with data present it then can look for commonalities which might give us a clue, or we could wait for someone to fund an RCT and remain clueless. There was an article in the New Scientist recently about the effectiveness of brute force, unthinking data mining compared to the ineffectiveness of experts. My endo told me that diabetes was incurable and progressive. I told him that my advantage was that I did not know that. Funnily enough I find myself walking away from the graveyard and I can explain it in detail at the molecular level.
Why not build a data mine on this forum and see if between us we might gain an insight. -
@ Andy. Like your idea re data mining. There was an article in the New Scientist this year on 'crowdthink' but I could not find anything comparing data mining as you suggest. Would you mind sending the reference? -
Although herbs and spices have numerous effects, mostly unknown to date, they do not, however, constitute as authentic remedies due to the lack of strong scientific evidence. There are more than 30 years of scientific research conducted on human Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes as well as on animal models. These are available on PubMed. There are new ground breaking discoveries including epigenetic control of diabetes. As with any scientific area, we are beginning to understand the underlying mechanisms of Type 1 and 2 diabetes. Opinions may be entertaining but have to be expressed with caution since one should not minimize the impact of scientific research and inadvertently misdirect the public who are desperate in getting new and effective therapies. -
@Maximillian. The article is on page 28 of New Scientist 1st December 2012. This was the sort of approach I took but being a dyslexic, so hard wired for pattern recognition, I did not need the machine algorithms. I began with monitoring serum glucose every 15 minutes during waking hours and analysed the signal in a paradigm free environment. I found myself looking at a driven dissipative chaotic oscillator, which is exactly what the glucose homoeostasis system must be with its two feedback loops. Serum glucose control has a ground state of 6mM/l but the normal function of the system also involves active control about higher levels and chaotic fluctuation. There was nothing wrong with my system only abnormal driving impulses. The data mining process was putting two words in the google search line and reading whatever literature was thrown up. This non-expert approach led me to Clostridium novyi type A alpha-toxin as the abnormal impulse and so to treatment. If I am correct (the results of duodenum bypass surgery support this) and high serum glucose only indicates the normal operation of of the homoeostasis system above its ground state then the entire philosophy of diabetic treatment needs to be reevaluated. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Fix the things that are broke. The answer may be a simple as fecal transplant to ensure we all have the right sort of phages to prevent C. novyi infection taking hold. Until we look at what is there, not at what we think ought to be there, we have no way of finding out. That is why every claim should be part of the data set. Even some new age cult twirling crystals might tell us something about the mental aspects although I doubt any CNS involvement because I could not find any one over f squared noise pattern in my glucose signal. Brain waves and music are just one over f squared noise to a physical scientist like me!
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@Sundararajan Jayaraman I think you may be falling into the trap of scientism. "Although herbs and spices have numerous effects, mostly unknown to date, they do not, however, constitute as authentic remedies due to the lack of strong scientific evidence." Animals have been self-medicating on plants and minerals since before there were any humans let alone scientists. Were their remedies not authentic? Evolution is a wonderful thing. It has endowed dumb animals with a physiological mechanism for finding remedies in their environment. We too have inherited this physiology and seek out those things that are beneficial for us and have been doing so since before we first leaned to strike an edge on a stone. A mere 30 years and $billions of scientific effort have given us a few ways to watch people die more slowly and still we do not understand the causes or mechanisms. Computer scientists use evolutionary algorithms to solve problems that are too hard to think out from first principles. Traditional medicines are our evolutionary algorithms. It is no accident that the people who developed Ayurvedic medicine also bred a knobbly cucumber with proven anti-diabetic properties to use as a vegetable. Of course when we try and get too smart and try to produce doctrines to codify our physiological intelligence we have a track record, like the doctrine of signatures, of producing nonsense. Are the simplistic assumptions behind current scientific research any better founded than the doctrine of signatures? Maybe they are just currently fashionable rather than scientific. Remember that the placebo effect produced empirical evidence for the doctrine of signatures. In our current state of knowledge we can not afford to throw out data generated by our evolutionary algorithms. We really need to look and see what is there not filter everything through our current and temporary belief system. Real science looks at all the data.
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Fei and Zhoa have produced some interesting results on bacterial causes of obesity and insulin resistance which would normally be regarded as first steps towards T2DM
http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ismej2012153a.html
The use of traditional Chinese medicinal foods is even more interesting. I will be taking a look at Enterobacter toxins. -
@Andy Biddulph. this is really a path breaking finding and I hope more and more scientists working in this area will take the cue and research to find the cure. Thank you Andy for the paper
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Andy Biddulph's very elaborate commentary invokes some interesting thoughts. I agree that scientific research to find 'cures' to diseases is expensive and does not produce immediate results. I doubt that we can 'cure' any disease ever but we can prolong the life of the individual and perhaps lessen the burden of the disease. However, you cannot simply draw conclusions based on certain ill defined and ill understood facts. There is hardly any evidence that animals have perfected their physiological mechanisms to fight against every disease unlike humans. We have robust immune system that guards against many diseases that we do not realize or recognize. In the same vein, it should be thought carefully why in a country with abundant ancient medicinal foods have the most cases of type 2 diabetes. The answer to that is not simple. We should also do not forget that genetics plays a crucial role in susceptibility to most diseases. On top it, we now know that environmental factors such as the gut flora can have impact on the health of people. Again, it is not well understood. In sum, Nature is very complex and we have only scratched the surface and cannot jump into conclusion. The sad part is that no one is immortal but we have to accept the inevitable fate. By the way, this forum is and should be heavily influenced by scientific facts and not hearsay.
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@SJ There is no evidence that animals have perfected their physiological mechanisms to fight against every disease … Evolution does not perfect anything, it only gives a better chance of getting by. The idea that the human immune system is more robust than that of animals is absurd. Have you seen what crocodiles eat! Imhotep spotted this and very sensibly prescribed crocodile dung as an antibiotic. I understand that several companies are following up Imhotep's initial findings. Maybe it is the prevalence of T2DM that caused the development of medicinal food to increase the chances of getting by. With our current lack of understanding of complex issues it is just plain foolish to reject any data on what amount to aesthetic grounds. Of course, any data needs to be evaluated but the evidence is that it is best done by seeing what the data says for itself rather than sifting it according to some paradigm founded on our current lack of understanding. We have no way to predict which data are important so every datum must be considered to have equal value until the data itself gives us the means of evaluating. I fully agree with Ravi's comments.
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Further to Fei and Zhao's findings. Their organism Enterobacter aerogenes is now called Klebsiella mobilis. Like its close cousin K. pnuemoniae it has a large genome which appears to have been eclectically collected as functional gene sets. Unlike the other Klebsiella, it can swim. It stole the complete flagella gene set from another bacterium. It carries several beta-lactamase genes and gene sets for destroying beta-lactamase inhibitors. It's promiscuity means it will be multi-drug resistant. It has multiple metabolisms being both aerobic and anaerobic. It can also fix nitrogen. Like C.novyi type A it is thiol dependent so may be inactivated by bariatric surgery. The toxins have not yet been characterised but Ryszard Koczura et al have done the initial investigations. http://jmm.sgmjournals.org/content/60/3/281.full They note the morphological changes induced by the toxins. Cells become rounded and shrink causing perforation of tissue membranes the same observation made by Peter Bett on C. novyi alpha toxin (the effect of an O-linked-N-acetylglucosamine transferase on the actin cytoskeleton.) This plus Fei and Zhao's results provide circumstantial evidence of K. mobilis having an O-linked-N-acetylglucosamine transferase toxin. If true this gives us another organism that has the capacity to cause T2DM and its complications but K. mobilis is not going to easy to treat.
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In India and other countries also we have journals on Traditional Knowledge and one such journal is Indian Journal of traditional knowledge http://www.niscair.res.in/sciencecommunication/researchjournals/rejour/ijtk/ijtk0.asp
published by CSIR ( a highly respected Scientific body). I am a scientist and work and work on garlic biotechnology. But if someone searches garlic in google you will get millions of hits showing papers eulogising its medicinal properties and most of the papers are on its antidiabetic potential . The comment that " it should be thought carefully why in a country with abundant ancient medicinal foods have the most cases of type 2 diabetes" made me think why it is so. According to me the reason is that Indians ape the western medical and other sciences without any thought and do not try to experiment with our own medicine system. I was dead opponent of homeopathic system but when I saw the results it is thousand times better that the allopathic system. Take for example Liv52, Cystone and other herbal drugs which even allopathic doctors recommend. So the point is a SCIENTIST is one who keeps his eyes and ears open to all the evidences whether he/she likes/believes or not and then come to the conclusion. We do RESEARCH not the SEARCH. -
Thanks Anil. This is just the sort of data I was talking about. The Kerala study http://nopr.niscair.res.in/bitstream/123456789/14964/1/IJTK%2011%284%29%20667-673.pdf is very interesting. The ritualisation of diagnosis and prescription shows that the accurate retention and transmission of the knowledge is important to the people involved. A study of this system may provide insights for our clinicians who appear to rely on a single number. A Fei and Zhao type study of these cases should prove very informative. However Fei and Zhao would not have found my C. novyi. It is a fastidious extreme anaerobe. In the one set of cases where efficacy of detection could be assessed, even Brazier was getting 40% false negatives with the best available techniques. What we need is an assay for O-linked-N-acetylglucosamine transferase toxin activity in urine samples. If such toxins are present in significant concentrations such large molecules will be leaking through the kidneys because of the general lack of integrity of membranes. Incidentally I have a very simple test for membrane integrity, eat beetroot. Before I began my war against C. novyi the colour was expressed in my urine. This no longer happens.
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Management of diabetic condition=yes
Parmanent cure=a hope thats being pursued, especially pancreatiic islet regeneration etc for type I -
Dm cannot be said to be generally curable now because stem cell transplant has not been easily accessible by all, then the herbs that people talk about can not be said to totally cure dm although it can reduce it even the mechanism of action of all those herbs are not know. -
What about diet and exercise, in case you are talking about type II?
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My own experience is that diet and exercise have little effect on serum glucose. T2DM symptoms tend to be idiopathic, so, postulating lifestyle effects is just the natural human tendency to find simplistic explanations for complex complex problems; a bit like buying books on how to predict lottery results. For those who eat junk food and do not get enough exercise, putting these factors right may improve general health but to extrapolate this to specific benefits for T2DM seems unjustified.
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http://www.biovea.com/in/product_detail.aspx?NAME=GRAPE-SEED-EXTRACT-100mg-120-Capsules&PID=268#.UOP1DKzhfCl
New paper on DM related plants -
We already have a cure for many cases of type 2 diabetes, especially very early in the course of the illness: Lifestyle modification ( improved diet, daily exercise and weight loss). Now if we could just figure out a way to get people to do it...
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The evidence for lifestyle change and weight loss curing early cases of type 2 diabetes - see the Diabetes Prevention Program Study results. Prevention in borderline patients, not cure, but basically unless you really believe that there is some irreversible non-arbitrary cut point or cliff you fall off over a certain threshold of insulin resistance, there is no true physiologic distinction. I have patients who are well controlled "diet and exercise controlled" diabetics not currently on medication or on metformin just because it seems like a good idea and not because they need it to keep their glucose in a normal range. Does that count as a cure?
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No medication and no symptoms sounds like a cure to me. Is it a good idea to give a drug with side effects when there is no clinical need?
Your questioning of some " irreversible non-arbitrary cut point or cliff you fall off over a certain threshold of insulin resistance" could get you burned as a heretic. Keep the hard questions coming. They are the only route to progress. -
Metformin has been shown to prevent progression to type 2 diabetes in patients at high risk, but it does not work as well as diet, exercise and weight loss.
