UK Doc: Type 2 Often Curable

By David Spero According to Dr. Roy Taylor of the United Kingdom's University of Newcastle, we need to change our understanding of what causes Type 2 diabetes. Then we can treat it and reverse it. What is this new understanding? Dr. Taylor made headlines in 2011 when his team "reversed" Type 2 diabetes in 11 people by putting them on a 600-calorie-a-day diet. His subjects achieved normal glucose levels within a week. That's not so amazing. If you don't eat, your glucose numbers will of course come down. But by the end of the eight-week study, most of them achieved normal numbers on a glucose tolerance test, which is much harder to do. It shows their insulin response had returned. "Their first phase insulin response increased gradually over 8 weeks of a very-low-calorie diet," Dr. Taylor reports. It became "indistinguishable from that of age- and weight-matched nondiabetic control subjects." In his new paper, called "Type 2 Diabetes: Etiology and Reversibility," Dr. Taylor describes how that recovery happened. He used new kinds of MRIs to look at what was actually happening to people's liver and pancreas. By seeing how liver and pancreas change as they get better, he says we can understand how diabetes develops in the first place. What he found is that fat in the liver and pancreas seems to cause all the problems. High fat levels cause the liver to become insulin resistant. So it starts pumping out unneeded glucose (the process the drug metformin tries to stop). As a fatty ...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs