Unfortunately there is no diabetes cure yet. However, many research programs are doing their best trying to find one. This is made more difficult due to diabetes being a very complicated disease that is divided into two types.
Type 1 is considered the mildest and type 2 which could endanger the life of a person. Either way, science hasn’t been able to discover how to eradicate it. The good thing is that it seems that we may soon see a diabetes cure. At least for type 1 diabetes.
Diabetes Cure Advances
Diabetes type 1 is also known as insulin-dependent diabetes or childhood diabetes. It usually attacks children or adolescents and its appearance leads to the absence of insulin. The current treatment is using insulin injections, diet, exercise and continuous monitoring on the levels of glucose in the blood of the affected person.
A proposed diabetes cure for this kind of diabetes is the transplant of islet cells from the pancreas of a compatible donor. This procedure has produced great advances in type 1 patients, but it is still at the experimental status. In 20% of the cases, it doesn’t work so it can’t be considered a complete cure. And, it can’t be used to treat children.
On the other hand, there is diabetes type 2. In this kind of diabetes, insulin levels are normal. The problem is with the surrounding tissue which stops accepting insulin. A way to manage diabetes type 2 is to use a drug like metformin, do exercise and eat a balanced diet. Unfortunately few people follow this regime and can die as a consequence.
Diabetes Cure Research
Medicine is always evolving. Thanks to the advances of technology, specially in biotech and nanotech, scientists have been able to explore new types of treatments that could make life easier to a person who suffers of diabetes. One of these possible breakthroughs are spleen cells.
At the moment the Massachusetts General Hospital Immunobiology Laboratory is using spleen cells in mice. And in many cases the disease is stopped, even reversed. Unfortunately the research is still in its early stages and it may take many years until we start seeing the results of this research.
Another avenue of research that is being explored is the use of gene therapy. The Baylor College of Medicine is testing a new procedure in which they inject cells into the livers of infected mice. The initial results are encouraging and show that the treatment cured the mice.
Fortunately, these are just two examples of research done into finding a cure for diabetes. Most people believe it is only a matter of time, although measured in years, before we see a diabetes cure.
