News: Open Source Insulin!?

Oakland Hackers Try to Make Insulin...

Below are a few excerpts from a news story out of California about 'Counter Culture Labs' and the researchers who are using its space to try and create open source insulin. It's worth a read...

from KQED News - By Andrew Stelzer

"The projects are as varied as the participants. In addition to developing vegan cheese, another group is trying to make an eco-friendly sunscreen. And the focus of tonight’s weekly meeting is the Open Insulin Project."

"The goal is to make and purify human insulin, and we want to do that in the simplest and least expensive way possible,” says Anthony DiFranco, who helped start the Open Insulin Project."

"DiFranco’s a Type 1 diabetic himself, which means he needs to use insulin to balance his blood sugar. Here in the lab, he and the team are using E. coli to try and produce something biologically similar to insulin."

You can read the entire story at KQED News

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Do Germs Trigger Type 1 Diabetes?

I always have this nagging feeling that I forgot to wash my hands or something when Arden was a baby. I know how ridicules it is to wonder but it's difficult at times not to think, "what if I could have done something differently...". Anyway, I thought this was an interesting article that you may like to see. Excerpts below with links to the entire research article if you're interested in reading more. 

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from ScienceDaily.com

Germs could play a role in the development of type 1 diabetes by triggering the body's immune system to destroy the cells that produce insulin, new research suggests.

“Killer T-cells sense their environment using cell surface receptors that act like highly sensitive fingertips, scanning for germs.

”However, sometimes these sensors recognise the wrong target, and the killer T-cells attack our own tissue. We, and others, have shown this is what happens during type 1 diabetes when killer T-cells target and destroy beta cells.”

— Cardiff University's Dr David Cole

Scientists have previously shown that killer T-cells, a type of white blood cell that normally protects us from germs, play a major part in type 1 diabetes by destroying insulin producing cells, known as beta cells.

Now, using Diamond Light Source, the UK's synchrotron science facility to shine intense super powerful X-rays into samples, a team from Cardiff University's Systems Immunity Research Institute found the same killer T-cells that cause type 1 diabetes are strongly activated by some bacteria.

The team hope this research will lead to new ways to diagnose, prevent or even halt type 1 diabetes.

You can read the entire article on Science Daily here.

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Glucagon Nasal Spray Effective for Hypoglycemia Rescue

from MedPage.com

Spray device easier for untrained people to use, experts say...

• Intranasal glucagon is effective and noninferior to injectable intramuscular glucagon for the correction of insulin-induced hypoglycemia in adults with type 1 diabetes, according to a randomized, cross-over study.
• Note that hypoglycemia was induced by administering insulin in a controlled setting, but this approximates the real-world setting of severe hypoglycemia occurring due to excessive therapeutic insulin with inadequate or absent endogenous glucagon response.
• An intranasal glucagon spray was as good as injectable glucagon for treating induced hypoglycemia in patients with type 1 diabetes, according to a randomized crossover noninferiority study.
• The effect of the nasal spray lagged a few minutes behind that of injections, but it met the study's pre-defined success criteria 74 out of 75 times, compared to 75 out of 75 with injectable glucagon, reported a team of investigators led by Michael Rickels, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
• Currently, only injectable glucagon is available for treating hypoglycemic episodes, and it comes in a powder that must be reconstituted in a diluent before injection.
• The intranasal glucagon, developed by Locemia Solutions, is in phase III clinical testing. Eli Lilly recently announced that it acquired worldwide rights to Locemia's intranasal glucagon and plans to bring it to market.

Read the entire article on MedPage.com

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Check out an episode of the Juicebox Podcast today...

News: Insulin pump may cut risk of heart disease deaths with diabetes

from Rueters Health: by Roxanne Nelson

(Reuters Health) - People with type 1 diabetes must control their blood sugar with insulin, but getting it automatically from an implanted pump may also help to stave off death from heart disease, according to a large Scandinavian study. 

Among more than 18,000 type 1 diabetics in Sweden followed over time, those with an insulin pump were about half as likely to die of heart-related causes, and 25 percent less likely to die of any cause, compared to those who injected themselves with insulin many times a day.

“Our study shows that treatment with an insulin pump almost halves the risk of cardiovascular mortality,” said lead study author Dr. Isabelle Steineck from Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark. 

“Personally I think that more persons with type 1 diabetes could benefit from using an insulin pump as long as they get all the right education about the pump and are able to understand how to use it,” she told Reuter’s Health in an email.

The rest of the article can be found here

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Language processing is impaired during moderate hypoglycemia

Effects of Acute Hypoglycemia on Working Memory and Language Processing...

New research sponsored by the ADA indicates that hypoglycemia causes significant deterioration in reading span and the accuracy of subject-verb agreement. Below is the research abstract from the study as well a link to the origin page. Click here to see the entire study in PDF form.

from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25758768

Effects of Acute Hypoglycemia on Working Memory and Language Processing in Adults With and Without Type 1 Diabetes.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of hypoglycemia on language processing in adults with and without type 1 diabetes.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Forty adults were studied (20 with type 1 diabetes and 20 healthy volunteers) using a hyperinsulinemic glucose clamp to lower blood glucose to 2.5 mmol/L (45 mg/dL) (hypoglycemia) for 60 min, or to maintain blood glucose at 4.5 mmol/L (81 mg/dL) (euglycemia), on separate occasions. Language tests were applied to assess the effects of hypoglycemia on the relationship between working memory and language (reading span), grammatical decoding (self-paced reading), and grammatical encoding (subject-verb agreement).

RESULTS: Hypoglycemia caused a significant deterioration in reading span (P < 0.001; η2 = 0.37; Cohen d = 0.65) and a fall in correct responses (P = 0.005; η2 = 0.19; Cohen d = 0.41). On the self-paced reading test, the reading time for the first sentence fragment increased during hypoglycemia (P = 0.039; η2 = 0.11; Cohen d = 0.25). For the reading of the next fragment, hypoglycemia affected the healthy volunteer group more than the adults with type 1 diabetes (P = 0.03; η2 = 0.12; Cohen d = 0.25). However, hypoglycemia did not significantly affect the number of errors in sentence comprehension or the time taken to answer questions. Hypoglycemia caused a deterioration of subject-verb agreement (correct responses: P = 0.011; η2 = 0.159; Cohen d = 0.31).

CONCLUSIONS: Hypoglycemia caused a significant deterioration in reading span and in the accuracy of subject-verb agreement, both of which are practical aspects of language involved in its everyday use. Language processing is therefore impaired during moderate hypoglycemia.

© 2015 by the American Diabetes Association. Readers may use this article as long as the work is properly cited, the use is educational and not for profit, and the work is not altered.

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