Is there a diabetes cure?

Is there a diabetes cure? The usual answer of course is no.  But let’s look a little more closely.

A diabetes cure would indeed be a remarkable thing.  Diabetes, particularly Type 2,  has become a worldwide epidemic.  In the United States and the United Kingdom, almost one fifth of the population already have diabetes, and as countries in the rest of the world adopt a more Western diet and way of living, the same tendency is being seen elsewhere, with India and China experiencing an explosion in the appearance of diabetes in their populations.

In Type 1 diabetes, where the insulin secreting cells in the pancreas are destroyed, it seems that a cure would be impossible.  However this is not necessarily the case and there are a number of possibilities being studied at the moment which might offer a genuine cure.  Firstly, some patients can be offered pancreatic transplantation so that they once again have functioning pancreases and their diabetes is cured.

Other approaches which may also offer a cure include transplantation of individual islet cells or of stem cells (immature cells which have the potential to develop into a whole lot of other types of cells), which can take over insulin production from the natural failing beta cells in someone with Type 1 diabetes.

Also, there are some experimental treatments being studied which work against the body’s immune processes continuing to destroy the beta cells of the pancreas.  Of particular interest here is treatment with the BCG vaccine, which is normally used to treat tuberculosis.  Other people have suggested that the nerves supplying the pancreas may play some part in the causation of diabetes, and there is some experimental evidence that treatments with drugs affecting these nerves can help the beta cells regenerate.  All these studies are of course in their very early stages, but they do offer some hope the future.

In relation to Type 2 diabetes, which makes up 95% of total, there are also some real hopes.  There are two main approaches here, both of which have been shown to be effective in practice.

The first is simply reducing the amount of carbohydrate in the diet.  In the past many people were treated in this way, but nowadays the recommendations from the major diabetes associations is to eat a relatively high carbohydrate and low fat diet because of the fear of heart disease.  In fact, the evidence for this approach is not good, and the pendulum is beginning to swing back towards using diets with a much lower carbohydrate content.  Some people have claimed that if you reduce the carbohydrate intake enough, diabetes will simply go away in quite a lot of people.

The other main approach which has attracted interest is based on the theory that Type 2 diabetes may be caused by artificially processed facts known as trans fats.  These do not occur naturally, but are widely used in the food industry.  There is some evidence to suggest that these should be eliminated entirely from the diet and replaced with naturally occurring fats and oils known as cis fats, particularly of the omega-3 type which occur in sources such as flax oil, hemp oil and fish oils.

A diabetes cure may not be around the corner, but certainly there are hopes that some or all of the approaches described above may help to reduce the damage caused by diabetes, which is rapidly becoming the commonest cause of death worldwide.

Dr Tony Woolfson MB BS DM MRCP(UK)
Learn how to master your diabetes.  Visit my website at www.diabetesdietdoctor.com.