Since Egyptians described diabetes in their manuscript and Indian physicians identified diabetes around 1500 BC, lots of discoveries are made regarding the pathogenesis and the treatment of diabetes: new technologies are invented and used in the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes, type-1 and type-2 diabetes are differentiated through time, lots of researches are done to find out a lasting solution to the devastating disease. Regardless of all the effort made diabetes type-1 remains incurable. It still continues to be one of the causes of death. The Genetics Home Reference web page noted the occurrence of type-1 diabetes in 10 to 20 per 100,000 people per year in the United States. By age 18, approximately 1 in 300 people in the United States develop type 1 diabetes. Worldwide, the number increases every year by 2 to 5 percent. (Genetics Home Reference, 2013)
The discussion of this paper focuses on the current development in etiology and pathogenesis, and the treatment of type 1 diabetes, and the prospects of new researches on type one diabetes.
Introduction
Our body needs energy to carry out its functions properly. This energy is synthesized from the food we eat. Our body breaks down the food we take in and then build up the required materials for a healthy functioning of our body. Glucose, a simple sugar or monosaccharide that is the end product of carbohydrate digestion, is a primary source of energy for living things. (Taber’s, 2005). Glucose gets absorbed from our intestines and distributed by the bloodstream to all of the cells in our body. If the supply of glucose is more than required, our body stores the excess amount of glucose as glycogen, a chain of glucose. If there is shortage in other hand, our body uses the stored...
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...finally heart attack and stroke as a result of atherosclerosis.
Treatment
Type-1 diabetes is a life time condition which needs lifelong medication and life style changes. One of the treatments is insulin injection. The major objective of the treatment is to control the sugar level in our bloodstream and prevent any further complications. In addition to insulin, exercise and healthy diet are important. Another prospective hope is islets transplant. Islets collected from a normal issue transplanted to a type-1 diabetes patient. The cell duplicate itself and function just like any other normal cells. Islets are cells found in the pancreas. They produce the hormone insulin which helps our body to take in the glucose in our blood stream. If this research succeeds and the treatment is available to everyone, it will give relief to patients from taking insulin daily.
Type 1 diabetes develops when the beta-cells are killed off by the immune system. This is because an inflammation is caused which the immune system fights off, ultimately destroying all/majority of beta cells. The role of the beta cells is to produce insulin within the pancreas. The beta cells are signalled when to release insulin’s to certain parts of the body. A person with type 1 diabetes is likely to have lost 70-80%1 of their beta-cells mass which is why they must manually inject insulin into themselves to maintain a healthy blood glucose level. When the blood glucose level falls (hypoglycaemia) you begin to lose energy.
Our body obtains the energy by digesting the carbohydrates into glucose. Volumes of glucose are required by the body to create ATP. ATP is short for 'Adenosine Triphosphate ' and is an energy carrier. When we consume too many carbohydrates our body produces a lot of glucose and as a result blood glucose levels rise and sometimes they may rise over the normal range of blood glucose concentration. To bring it back within the healthy range, the homeostatic system of blood glucose regulation is used. The blood flows through the pancreas where the beta cells, receptors, detect the high blood glucose level. To counteract this stimuli beta cells alert the control centre, which are also the beta cells located in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. The secretion of insulin has to be done quickly but can only be carried out when insulin gene is switched on. Turning on the insulin gene switch can take 30 minutes to an hour therefore, the production of insulin by beta cells are done in advance and are packaged in vesicles right until blood glucose rises. Glucose comes into the beta cell to trigger the vesicle that contains the insulin to move towards the plasma membrane and fuse. This releases the insulin into the bloodstream where they are distributed throughout the body and only affect specific target cells. The receptor, a protein, on the target cell’s plasma membrane recognises and connects
1. Type 1 diabetes is a result from the body’s failure to produce insulin, which requires the individual to inject insulin in other ways (RCT).
By the 1920s, diabetes was considered a global epidemic, affecting people across the globe. Scientists unanimously agreed that diabetes was “the failure of the pancreas to secrete enough of a certain mysterious substance necessary for the proper utilization of carbohydrates as a body fuel.”2 This had stumped scientists for years, and no sufficient cure or treatment had been found. However, in 1921, Toronto doctor Frederick Banting, assisted by J. Macleod, Charles Best, and Dr. J.B Collip successfully created insulin, which was subsequently tested on dogs with diabetes before experimenting on the first human, Leonard Thompson in
The focus for finding an immunological cure for diabetes mellitus type 1 should be directed to prevent maturation or cause inactivation of autoreactive T cells to halt the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells. Inactivation of the autoreactive T cells can be accomplished in two ways. First, antigen presenting cells, such as dendritic cells, that present auto antigens can be modified to prevent maturation or expression of co-stimulatory receptor. Secondly, the T cell can remain in the naïve state or be inactivated after activation by an antigen presenting cell. Diabetes mellitus, commonly known as diabetes, is categorized into type 1, insulin dependent, and type 2, insulin resistant, and the focus will be on the former. Type 1diabetes is a chronic autoimmune disease occurring when insulin-producing beta cells are destroyed by autoreactive CD8 T cells.1 Beta cells are endocrine cells that only secrete insulin and are found in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. When the first clinical symptoms of diabetes are apparent in a patient, 80% of the beta cells have already been destroyed.1When large amounts of beta cells are destroyed, it only leaves a fraction of insulin left for the body to utilize, which is often not enough to support function. Type 1 diabetes affects an estimated 30 million people worldwide.1 There is no cure for type 1 diabetes and someone with this disease would need to monitor their blood glucose levels and manually give themselves insulin injections to regulate those levels. However, using insulin injections is not a cure.
The article, “Pancreas Transplant: A Cure for Diabetes?” written by Eli A. Friedman, M.D., explores the possibility of a cure for type 1 diabetes and the implications involving this experimental procedure. The article discusses current procedures and treatments that are commonly used to control type 1 diabetes and highlights provisional treatments that evolved into pancreatic transplant surgery.
Type 1 diabetes has a genetic onset that often occurs in adolescence (Porth, 2005). It is an autoimmune disease in which the insulin-producing beta cells within the liver are destroyed (Dorman, 1993). This causes a deficiency in insulin secretion, which ultimately leads to high blood glucose levels, also referred to as hyperglycemia (Guthrie & Guthrie, 2004). The mechanism for insulin deficiency leading to hyperglycemia is described in more detail in the following section and in Figure 1.
Pancreatic transplant is the patients’ key for insulin independence that leads to a better quality of life, with less diabetic complications. Pancreatic islet cell transplantation is another intervention for life long management for uncontrolled and complicated DM types I especially the hypos. The Indications and contraindications for Pancreas Transplantation and islet cell transplant depend on which type of transplant the patient need. The outcomes of Pancreatic transplant and Islet cell transplantation are promising. Further developments in this field are coming hoping to find effective and efficient solution for DM type1 and its complications.
People with Type 1 diabetes do nor produce enough insulin. So insulin needs to be injected into their bodies to control the level of g...
Xenotransplantation is the transplantation of organs, tissues or cells from one species to another. Although currently it is only at a preclinical stage, in the near future xenotransplantation could solve the problem of the severe shortage of human organs available for transplant. Currently in the United States, “13 patients die each day waiting to receive a life-saving transplant to replace a diseased organ” 1 The deficiency of donor tissues such as pancreatic islets is also increasing, with statistics in 2002 showing that approximately 140 million people in the world have diabetes but only several thousand pancreatic glands become available annually. 2 This shortage could also be addressed by xenotransplantation using pancreatic islets from
There are many symptoms of type one diabetes. They include drinking irritability, excessive urination, extreme weight loss, feeling very hungry or tired, sores that don’t heal and blurry eyesight. The cause of type one diabetes is unknown, although genetic tendency and childhood infections are two possibilities. The pancreas undergoes a change and cells that normally produce insulin are destroyed. This may be a result of the body’s own immune system believing the pancreas is a foreign organ. Also, type one diabetes often appears at times of physical stress and during illness when the body produces extra ...
United States. (2011). Type 1 Diabetes Research: Real Progress and Real Hope for a Cure. Hearing Before the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, United States Senate, of the One Hundred Eleventh Congress, First Session, June 24, 2009. Washington, DC: Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 2011
In the 1920s, Dr. Frederick Banting discovered that insulin was able to help reduce the sugar level in the blood. There are many health issues around the world, Diabetes is one of them. “Diabetes is a metabolic disease in which the body’s inability to produce any or enough insulin causes elevated levels of glucose in the blood” (Google). There are two principal kinds of diabetes there is type 1 and type 2. “Type 1 is called juvenile diabetes which is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin”("Type 1 Diabetes - Google Search."). “Type 2 Diabetes is much more common that Diabetes type 1.However, type two is called onset adult diabetes which is a chronic condition that affects the way the body processes blood sugar”("Type
On my mother’s side of the family Type-1 diabetes is prevalent and it isn’t entirely considered an inherited disease, but it has been proven to have some genetic factors that can be passed down. Diabetes is becoming an increasing problem in the United States with half of all Americans becoming either diabetic or pre-diabetic.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition, which means your immune system attacks healthy body tissue by mistake. In this case, it attacks the cells in your pancreas. Your damaged pancreas is then unable to produce insulin. So, glucose cannot be moved out of your bloodstream and into your cells.