Like doctors around the world, Randy Wolcott was confounded by diabetic foot ulcers. Read more »

New data from a two-year Duke Health trial suggests when it comes to cutting your risk for killer ailments such as diabetes and heart disease, there's always room for improvement. Read more »

The assumption that minimizing weight gain in obese pregnant women is advantageous for avoiding gestational diabetes has not been borne out. This was shown by a study conducted by MedUni Vienna's Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Indeed, it might even be detrimental to the mother and the unborn child to restrict carbohydrate intake during pregnancy. These results have recently been published in the leading journal Diabetes Care. Read more »

For patients with Type 1 diabetes who don't respond well to insulin or have other serious medical complications caused by their disease, pancreas transplantation offers hope for a cure. But obese candidates who need a pancreas transplant often are denied the procedure because of poor outcomes, including high rates of incision infections, which are linked to an increased risk for failure and loss of the implanted organ. Read more »

(HealthDay)—When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1939, Don Ray was just 4 years old. Doctors told his parents he'd likely live well into his teens. Read more »

Every-other-day fasting substantially reduces the likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes in mice eating a fat-rich diet, according to new research out of the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke. These findings, presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior in Utrecht, Netherlands, suggest that periodic fasting can reduce fat accumulation in the pancreas and, in turn, prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes. "We observed that pancreatic fat cells directly affect islet insulin secretion and that this can be altered by eating patterns" said Dr. Mandy Stadion, a post-doctoral research fellow who led this study. Read more »

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis is supported by multiple human epidemiological studies and animal studies. It states that the nutritional environment in early life makes people susceptible to lifestyle-related diseases, such as obesity, diabetes and heart attack, as adults. Many of those diseases exhibit reduced mitochondrial metabolism in the tissues of the body. Now, researchers from Kumamoto University in Japan reveal that two metabolic pathways involved in energy metabolism may play a role in the DOHaD hypothesis. Read more »

A small chemical change—shifting the position of two hydrogen atoms—makes the difference between mice that are healthy and mice with insulin resistance and fatty liver, major risk factors for diabetes and heart disease. Making the change prevented the onset of these symptoms in mice fed a high-fat diet and reversed prediabetes in obese mice. Read more »

Training prisoners with diabetes how to manage their disease could prevent hospitalizations and diabetes-related medical crises after they are released, a team of researchers from UConn and the Connecticut Department of Corrections reported last month at the 79th annual scientific meeting of the American Diabetes Association. Read more »

Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center have shown that a protein found in the eye can protect against and potentially treat diabetic eye disease. At high enough levels, Retinol Binding Protein 3 (or RBP3) prevents the development of diabetic retinopathy. If introduced early enough in the development of the disease, RBP3 was shown to reverse the effects of the complication in rodent models of diabetes. These results are reported today in Science Translational Medicine. Read more »

Cancer has overtaken cardiovascular disease as the most common cause of death in Scottish adults with type 2 diabetes, according to a study published in the Journal of Diabetes Investigation. Read more »

A Joslin Diabetes Center study among people treated for type 1 diabetes for many years has discovered that a minority may have monogenic diabetes, a non-autoimmune inherited condition that in some cases does not require insulin treatment. Read more »

Type 1 and type 2 diabetes affect the health of the inner lining of blood vessels. People with diabetes often experience complications in the eyes, heart, and other organs because of worsening blood vessel damage over the long term. One of the earliest signs of systemic inflammation in the blood vessels is the increased sticking of immune cells to the inner lining. As inflammation and microvascular damage continues in the light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye—the retina—diabetic retinopathy can ensue. Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of severe vision loss and blindness. A pressing question in diabetes research is how elevated blood levels of sugar, cholesterol, and fat may contribute to blood vessel damage in relation to the diet. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital set out to determine which components of the Western diet—one rich in sugar, cholesterol and fat—may worsen diabetes complications. The team examined the effects of different dietary fats on the earliest molecular signs of retinal inflammation and damage in an experimental rodent model of type 1 diabetes. The results are published in The FASEB Journal. Read more »

Intermittent fasting is known to improve sensitivity to the blood glucose-lowering hormone insulin and to protect against fatty liver. DZD scientists from DIfE have now discovered that mice on an intermittent fasting regimen also exhibited lower pancreatic fat. In their current study published in the journal Metabolism, the researchers showed the mechanism by which pancreatic fat could contribute to the development of type 2 diabetes. Read more »

(HealthDay)—Metformin use may promote a survival benefit in individuals with post-pancreatitis diabetes mellitus (PPDM), but not pancreatic cancer-related diabetes (PCRD), according to a study published online June 21 in Diabetes Care. Read more »

Antidepressants reduce deaths by more than a third in patients with diabetes and depression, according to a study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Read more »

Why does weight gain cause metabolic problems that can lead to heart disease and diabetes in some individuals, but not others? Researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts (HNRCA) have found one clue: a gene associated with obesity and development of type 2 diabetes, they discovered, is also connected to how cells regulate fat at the cellular level. The study about the research was published in the journal Molecular Metabolism. Read more »

Regular injections of a cholesterol-cutting drug could reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke in patients with diabetes and who have had a recent heart attack. Read more »

In 2007, Patrice Cani (FNRS-WELBIO researcher) and his team at the Louvain Drug Research Institute of University of Louvain, in close collaboration with Willem de Vos, professor at UWageningen, discovered the beneficial effects of intestinal bacteria, Akkermansia muciniphila, able to moderate the development of obesity and type 2 diabetes, in mice. In 2017, the team discovered (still in the mouse) that the use of a pasteurized form of Akkermansia leads to an even greater protection than the living bacterium regarding various cardiovascular disease risk factors such as insulin resistance, hypercholesterolemia, or the storage of fat in adipose tissue. Read more »

(HealthDay)—The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that some high-tech insulin pumps made by Medtronic are being recalled for potential cybersecurity risks that could leave them vulnerable to hacking. Read more »