{"id":155189,"date":"2010-01-08T16:14:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T21:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.diabetesforums.com\/forum\/type-1-diabetes\/47400-the-artificial-pancreas-cure.html"},"modified":"2010-01-08T16:14:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-08T21:14:00","slug":"the-artificial-pancreas-and-the-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/155189","title":{"rendered":"The Artificial Pancreas and the Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"
When I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1966. I was told not to worry because there would be a cure for the disease "within the next 5 or 10 years." Since then I have read of type 1 diabetes being cured or being about to be cured countless times, but unfortunately, this seems true only in the world of newspapers, not in the real world.<\/p>\n

Most efforts at a cure focus on normalizing blood sugar levels, but since type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, some scientists wonder why repairing the first symptom it causes — abnormal blood sugar — should also cure the disease itself. Curing a disease of the immune system by tinkering with the metabolism seems counterintuitive.<\/p>\n

The approach which has attracted the most funding over the years has been the artificial, implantable pancreas, a device which would store and release just the right amount of insulin needed for current blood sugar requirements. The fact that scientists have been working on this continuously for about 40 years now without success suggests it may never be workable. <\/p>\n

The problems are that since the blood sugar levels in different parts of the body are naturally different, it is difficult to know where the level should be measured to produce an accurate feedback system. Also, any probe in contact with the blood to measure sugar levels will become coated with antibodies, which will then render the probe ineffective. The body normally releases insulin from the innermost core of the body at the pancreas, where it is metabolized by the liver before going into general circulation, so unless the artificial pancreas could be positioned there, the instant response of insulin output to metabolic requirements can never be achieved. But the pancreas is extremely difficult to access surgically, and there is no prospect of ever being able to perform such major surgery on any significant number of type 1 patients so as to cure the disease for the whole population with this intervention. Finally, evolution has recognized that insulin overdose is an extremely dangerous risk, so it releases insulin from tens of thousands of beta cells, each of which senses the right amount to release, with the result that if one or more beta cells misfunction, the others can put out more or less insulin to correct for this. But with any artificial pancreas it would be economically impossible to replicate the tens of thousands of functional units the body has, so the danger of a sudden, massive release of stored insulin as a result of mechanical malfunction would be high, and this would cause the rapid death of the patient. <\/p>\n

I would guess at this point that the artificial pancreas will never represent a practical solution to treating diabetes, even if we assume the now contested hypothesis that the complications of diabetes are caused solely by the blood sugar abnormalities, which are themselves only the first side-effect of an autoimmune disease which never stops attacking the body. Unfortunately, the JDRF continues to funnel huge amounts of money into this dead-end, while neglecting other, more promising prospects for a cure.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1966. I was told not to worry because there would be a cure for the disease "within the next 5 or 10 years." Since then I have read of type 1 diabetes being cured or being about to be cured countless times, but unfortunately, this seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}