Fessing up to diabetes miracle cures.

The previous post posits the idea that Ketosis Prone Diabetes might be at the center of a breakthrough in curing diabetes. This would be a good thing since, it's my guess that we are also at the center of a whole bunch of "miracle cures" for diabetes.

Why am I pointing to KPD's as the bad guys here? I mean don't we pet animals? Aren't we nice to children? Yeah, all the above but I didn't say we aren't nice, I said that we are the bad guys. You just have to look at what we are and it all becomes clear. We are the essence of mystery, magic, tragedy, conquest and redemption. In other words, we are Hollywood, big time.

The first thing is our air of mystery. We are so mysterious that we don't even know about ourselves. Imagine a superhero with secret powers who doesn't know it because he has to know the secret word or situation to invoke his powers. Well, he doesn't know about his secret power because no one has ever told him such a power exists and the secret word or situation are kind of locked up in never never land. So he goes about his ordinary life doing ordinary things without a hint of the secret locked inside of him.

Okay, so we've got mystery here. Now we go for the magic. The KPD wanders through life until for some reason, maybe it was a pizza party or a triple double banana chocolate split, the magic happens. The blood sugar goes through the roof. A nurse asks him in Emergency, "How long have you been a diabetic?" Diabetic? He answers, "Ten seconds". Anyway, out of nowhere, magically, the KPD becomes a diabetic. He doesn't get to be the guy who has to give up the donuts. He gets the death sentence. He's a Type 1! A week ago he was just Joe Schmoo, now he's on death row.

This is, at least, the greater publics perception of being T1: bland foods, needles and then your body parts start getting hacked off. They don't know some of the party beast T1's we know but before we were anointed with the "Big D", we pretty much had the same view.

Life's over. It's just a matter of time. There's the brave fight in intensive care and he battles his way through only to find himself, stabbing his fingers daily, sticking needles in his body and chasing wild blood sugars around as he tries to keep up with the ADA rule of eating 300 g of carbs a day.

Then it happens, some how some where, he hears of a cure. It involves eating meat, or protein, or raw vegetables, could be anything. The point is that he starts working this new system and his need for insulin goes down and continues to go down till eventually he doesn't need to take insulin. His A1c is normal. His FBG's are fantastic and the Lipid profile is to die for. The diabetes is cured!

There you have it, all the Hollywood drama you could want and with a happy ending. I mean it's all there. Type 1 takes the cure and within 30 days, he's off insulin and living a normal life.

I love a good story but let's look under the hood here. Most KPD's are very sudden onset, most of them don't show diabetic FBG's six months before winding up in ER. If they are thin, like me, they are going to be diagnosed as T1 and standard practice for DKA is a insulin regimen. If they continue eating the "healthy food pyramid", which is low fat and high carb, they will continue to have to take insulin. Once the problem of diet is solved. They will have both more energy and lower blood sugars and as a consequence will lose weight and be more active. TADA! The miracle of a diabetic cure.

Of course, the real trick is knowing the secret word. Ketosis Prone Type 2 Diabetes.

Mike

Ketosis Prone T2 Diabetes, the key to finding a diabetes cure?

A interesting piece of information fell across my path today and I'd like to share it.

Some Cells in Pancreas Can Spontaneously Change Into Insulin-Producing Cells, Diabetes Researchers Show

You can find this here. 

This paper purports to look at possible cures for Type 1 diabetes but what was done seems very close to what happens to a KPD during sudden onset of DKA.

Researcher engineered mice to respond to a toxin that would destroy 99% of their beta cells inducing a sudden onset of DKA because these mice had essentially no beta cells left.What they found is that the pancreas would, without any further manipulations, grow new beta cells by using the alpha cells. If the mice were kept on insulin this process would continue until the pancreas would once again return to full functioning and the mice would no longer have diabetes.

Does this sound like anyone you know: sudden onset DKA, intensive insulin therapy and a return to near normal glycemic levels independent of insulin?

This gets better. Because of this blog, I have come in contact with quite a few KPD's, and (I might have mentioned this some where else in this blog) I've noted that many KPD's return to having very normal type numbers, hardly ever going over 100. What has seemed to be the case is that the ones who had DKA seemed to have better numbers than those who caught the process early, like me. 

The researchers found that the destruction of beta cells had to exceed 95% to get the significant rebound back to glycemic normalcy.

People, we might have caught the break we have been looking for. Researchers are looking at this experiment as a significant breakthrough in the understanding of diabetes but this was done in mice. Typically, mice studies, if they ever prove out, take years before the lessons learned result in any type of treatment. Here we might very well have the process that they are looking at as the key to solving diabetes.