WTNH.com Staff Published: February 15, 2017, 6:01 pm Updated: February 15, 2017, 6:01 pm

(WTNH) In this weeks Ask the Doctor segment, we are talking about diabetes.

For more insight, News 8s Darren Kramer spoke with Dr. Beth Collins. Collins is double board certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery.

Diabetes affects more than 30 million people. A new study shows there is a genetic link between where you carry your body fat and your risk of diabetes.

Some of the questions we asked:

Many people miss the signs and symptoms of diabetes. What are they?

Theres Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Whats the difference?

How are they treated?

Theres a new study that changes liver cells in pancreas cells to produce insulin. How does that work?

Check out the video above for Dr. Beths answers, and catch News 8 at 5 p.m. every Wednesday for our Ask the Doctor segments.

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Ask the Doctor: Diabetes - WTNH Connecticut News (press release)

When the doctor tells someone they have diabetes, the first thing that often goes through their mind is all the different foods they will not be able to eat as they work to lower their A1C blood glucose level.

This experience is common, but does not have to be true, once you have attended Kitchen Creations, a free diabetes cooking school. New Mexico State Universitys College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences is offering an evening cooking school in Valencia County beginning Thursday, March 9.

This is the first time in many years that we have offered Kitchen Creations in the evening, said Laura Bittner, NMSUs Cooperative Extension Service family and consumer science agent in Valencia County. In recent years, our greatest request has been for morning classes. Hopefully, this evening class, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., will give people, who have missed out because of their traditional work schedule, an opportunity to attend.

The classes will be Thursdays, March 9, 16, 23 and 30, at Peralta Memorial United Methodist Church, 25 Wesley Road in Peralta. Registration deadline is Wednesday, March 1. Call 565-3002 to register.

Many people with diabetes are not sure what to do to improve their health, especially when it comes to food. Kitchen Creation goes beyond simply providing nutrition information to engaging participants in activities so they can immediately apply what they are learning. said Cassandra Vanderpool, registered dietitian and NMSU Extension diabetes coordinator of the program that is provided by New Mexico Department of Health Prevention and Control Program and NMSU.

Kitchen Creations is a series of four once-a-week, three-hour classes with an informal education component, as well as hands-on experience preparing delicious recipes that are low in sugar, salt and fat.

This is a fun, educational class that makes understanding and managing diabetes much easier, Bittner said of the class she team-teaches with diabetes educator Cathy Chavez. Its scary when you are first diagnosed. The program explains things very simply and in a very comfortable environment.

During the second half of the class everyone gets involved in making a meal with a combined total of 45 carbohydrates, which is a good range for many individuals with diabetes.

What is exciting is the food not only tastes good, its also incredibly filling, Bittner said. Its really about managing portion sizes and making sure you have a balance of carbohydrates and proteins in each meal or snack.

The best part of the class is the medical results.

Several months after attending the Kitchen Creations cooking school, a participant called and told me she had just returned from the doctor, and her A1C had dropped, Bittner said. She attributed the improvement to the changes she and her husband, who also attended the classes, had made in their cooking and eating habits as a result of what they had learned in our classes.

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Kitchen Creations, free diabetes cooking school, now offered in the evening - Valencia County News Bulletin

It may be possible to slow the progression of type 1 diabetes, according to a new pilot study that used an experimental therapy that centers on the immune system.

In the new study, researchers in Sweden tested a new method to train the immune system to stop attacking the body's own insulin-producing cells, according to the findings published today (Feb. 15) in the New England Journal of Medicine. With only six participants, the study was small, but experts called these early results exciting.

In people with type I diabetes, the immune system mistakenly recognizes certain proteins in beta cellsas foreign invaders and wages a war against them. Once the beta cells have been killed, the pancreas produces little or no insulin, the hormone that regulates how the body absorbs sugar from the blood to use for energy. As a result, patients need to follow lifelong treatments such as insulin injections to keep their blood sugar levels at normal ranges. [9 Healthy Habits You Can Do in 1 Minute (Or Less)]

This destruction of beta cells doesn't happen overnight, however. Although the majority of them are gone by the time someone is diagnosed, some cells manage to dodge the attacks and continue to produce some insulin. That's why several research teams have been working on finding ways to rescue the remaining cells, or delay their destruction in people who have been recently diagnosed with the condition.

In the new study, the researchers injected a protein normally found on beta cells directly into the patients' lymph nodes.

"This method has shown the best efficacy so far," at slowing the disease's progression, said Dr. Johnny Ludvigsson, senior professor of pediatrics at Linkping University and the study's lead investigator. "But we have to be cautious. The number of patients is small."

If confirmed in larger trials, the therapy could bring a number of benefits to patients. The ability to make insulin secretion, even if only at very low levels, dramatically decreases people's risk of complications, such as episodes of dangerously low blood sugar levels, Ludvigsson told Live Science.

The small amount of insulin that the patients in the study could produce would also make it easier for the patients to maintain a good blood sugar balance, improving their quality of life. It would also reduce their risk of long-term complications of the disease, such as heart attack, stroke, neuropathy, kidney problems and eye disease.

"These are exciting results," said Dr. Lawrence Steinman, a professor of pediatrics and neurological sciences at Stanford University, who was not involved with the study. Steinman echoed Ludvigsson's warning that the study is small, and said that trials with more people and which include a control group of patients who are given a placebo are needed to confirm the findings.

The injections that the researchers gave to the patients in the study contained a protein called GAD, which is normally found in the beta cells. Ludvigsson and his colleagues injected this protein into the patients' lymph nodes near the groin. Lymph nodes contain many immune cells, and the idea behind the treatment is that exposing the body's immune cells to larger amounts of GAD than they normally encounter will cause the immune cells to become more tolerant of GAD, and halt their attack on it.

The participants in the study were ages 20 to 22, and all had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes within the last six months. The researchers followed up with the patients six to 15 months after the treatment, and found that the functioning of the pancreas had not declined, as expected in the typical course of the disease, but remained stable.

Previously, Ludvigsson's team had tried the same treatment, but had injected the protein under the skin. The new results suggest that an injection directly into the lymph nodes better exposes immune cells to the self-antigen.

"With a much lower dose, we got a very strong desired effect on the immune system," Ludvigsson said.

The team is now planning to repeat the study in a larger number of people, which would take a few years, Ludvigsson said.

Although these results are far too early to be applied to patients, they lend promising evidence to a relatively new line of research that aims to modify the immune system with high precision to treat or perhaps even cure type 1 diabetes.

"A few approaches are in clinical trials, but nothing is yet on the market," Steinman said. "Antigen-based therapy [which was used in the new study] is a sought-after approach, but only a few in the world are attempting this."

In his own work, Steinman has focused on another protein, called proinsulin, which also becomes a target of the immune system in people with type 1 diabetes.

In a 2012 clinical trial with 80 people, Steinman and his team injected participants with a chunk of DNA-encoding proinsulin, in an attempt to desensitize the immune system to proinsulin. The researchers found that the function of the pancreas not only stabilized, but actually improved. It is possible, Steinman said, that some beta cells somehow hide from the immune attacks by going into hibernation, and that once the attacks are eased, they recover and resume function. Plans for the next trial are ongoing, Steinman said.

An immune therapy for type 1 diabetes in the future might combine some of the various approaches that different research teams have tried.

"So far, almost all studies have been performed testing one drug at a time, and they have not been effective enough," Ludvigsson said. "My opinion is that we need a combination of different approaches. For example, different drugs, given in a planned scheme, as is done in oncology. And not until just recently has that idea started to become accepted."

Originally published on Live Science.

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Experimental Therapy May Slow Type 1 Diabetes - Live Science

People who undergo gastric bypass surgery are more likely to experience a remission of their diabetes than patients who receive a gastric sleeve or intensive management of diet and exercise, according to a new study. Bypass surgery had already shown better results for diabetes than other weight-loss methods in the short term, but the new research followed patients for five years.

We knew that surgery had a powerful effect on diabetes, says Philip Schauer of the Bariatric & Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. What this study says is that the effect of surgery is durable. The results were published online February 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study followed 134 people with type 2 diabetes for five years in a head-to-head comparison of weight-loss methods. At the end of that time, two of 38 patients who only followed intensive diet and exercise plans were no longer in need of insulin to manage blood sugar levels. For comparison, 11 of 47 patients who had a gastric sleeve, which reduces the size of the stomach, and 14 of 49 who underwent gastric bypass, a procedure that both makes the stomach smaller and shortens digestion time, did not need the insulin anymore. In general, patients who had been diabetic for fewer than eight years were more likely to be cured, Schauer says.

Even those surgical patients who still needed to take insulin had greater weight loss and lower median glucose levels than others in the study. This study was also one of the few to show that bariatric surgery could help those with only mild obesity, defined as a body mass index between 27 and 34. How bariatric surgery might improve diabetes is still unknown, but scientists have pointed to effects on the bodys metabolism (SN: 8/24/13, p. 14) and gut microbes (SN: 9/5/15, p. 16).

Over five years, gastric bypass patients showed bettercontrol ofblood sugar levels than patients whoused a gastric sleeve or medical management such as intensive diet and exercise plans.

The same research team had published similar results at one and three years after surgery, but few studies looked further, says Kristoffel Dumon, a bariatric surgeon with the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. The criticism of bariatric research has been that there are no good long-term results. With weight-loss surgery, you often see rapid initial results, but you want to see that to a five-year time point.

Dumon also notes that the patients who received only intensive medical therapy did not report an improvement in their quality of life, and their emotional well-being worsened. People in the surgical group reported improvements in quality of life, but not in emotional well-being, a finding that Schauer says has more to do with stress management and other characteristics that wouldnt necessarily be affected by surgery.

Schauer hopes to have even longer-term data in the future. His team will combine their results with those from similar research at three other U.S. sites with the goal of following patients for up to 10 years.

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Gastric bypass controls diabetes long term better than other ... - Science News

Men's Health

How to Reverse Diabetes Men's Health "Diabetes mellitus" comes from the Greek word for siphon, referring to the excess urine that's a key symptom of the disease, and a Latin word for sweetness, referring to the sugar the body is trying desperately to unload. History doesn't tell us who ...

The rest is here:
How to Reverse Diabetes - Men's Health

Home Diabetes Diabetes linked to DNA: Study

Researchers have found a link between certain variations in DNA and the development of type 2 diabetes that may explain why some individuals get the disease while those with similar lifestyles do not.

A team of scientists has published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stating that some genetic defects associated with diabetes change the way certain cells in the pancreas read their genes. This is the first bit of evidence that many of the DNA changes associated with the development of type 2 diabetes are linked with a DNA reading molecule called Regulatory Factor X, or RFX. This new research shows that the ability of RFX to bind with islets in the pancreas is affected by the DNA changes characteristic of diabetes, resulting in reduced cell function. Islets are responsible for the cells that create hormones like insulin and glucagonthe hormones necessary for the management and regulation of blood sugar.

Dr. Stephen C.J. Parker, a senior co-author of the study, explained We have found that many of the subtle DNA spelling differences that increase risk of type 2 diabetes can appear to disrupt a common regulatory grammar in islet cells. RFX is probably unable to read the misspelled words, and this disruption of regulatory grammar plays a significant role in the genetic risk of type 2 diabetes.

To conduct their research, the team examined DNA from islet samples gathered from 112 participants. Differences were characterized in DNA sequences, the modification and packaging of DNA by nongenetic factors, and levels of gene expression that allowed scientists to determine how often a gene had been read. Following these multiple points, researchers were able to track the effects of RFX and other transcription factors left on unpackaged DNA.

This research has linked the risk of developing type 2 diabetes to a genetic factor, helping to explain why some people may be more prone than others who lead the same lifestyle. Researchers hope this new information may lead to the development of more personalized treatment methods for diabetes.

Related: Diabetes diet: Healthy snacks for managing diabetes

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http://www.uofmhealth.org/news/archive/201702/diabetes-your-dna-scientists-zero-genetic-signature-risk

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Diabetes linked to DNA: Study - Bel Marra Health