{"id":159462,"date":"2010-01-09T18:29:27","date_gmt":"2010-01-09T23:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.diabetesforums.com\/forum\/type-1-diabetes\/47440-dr-faustman-and-cure.html"},"modified":"2010-01-09T18:29:27","modified_gmt":"2010-01-09T23:29:27","slug":"dr-faustman-and-the-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/159462","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Faustman and the Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"
Research by Dr. Denise Faustman offers the possibility of a more natural, biological approach to curing type 1 diabetes. It is based on the observation that the islet cells of diabetics continue to be regenerated throughout the life of the patient, but the autoimmunity continues to attack them, so the critical mass of islets is never regrown to allow for normal metabolism to be restored.<\/p>\n

Faustman’s treatment operates in two stages. First, an old and safe drug, BCG, long used in treating tuberculosis, is given to the patient to stop the autoimmune attack on the beta cells of the pancreas. Since in practice this does not allow the already heavily damged beta cells to regrow, the second stage requires giving the patient some substance to stimulate the regrowth, and the main agent used for this so far is INGAP polypeptide. In theory, the combination of BCG and INGAP should stop the autoimmune assault and stimulate regrowth of the beta cells, so the patient would no longer be diabetic.<\/p>\n

It is clear that this works in mice and hamsters, but these animals do not provide a very good model for diabetes in humans. In hamsters it has been found that the beta cell mass, after having been chemically destroyed, increases again in the presence of INGAP polypetide by about 75% of the original mass within 30 days and restores normoglycemia. Proctor and Gamble has been testing this in human subjects since 2003 but the study has not yet reported any final results.<\/p>\n

However, there are some problems. First, severely damaged tissue in the human body is typically severely resistant to regrowth. For example, although immunosuppression with Cyclosporine usually causes massive overgrowth of gum tissue in normal subjects, in diabetics who have lost considerable gum mass before treatment, there is absolutely no gum growth. This same lack of regrowth may occur in those who have suffered an especially virulent or long-term autoimmune attack on the pancreas. <\/p>\n

Also, tuberculosis used to be the main complication of diabetes, and still is in some third world countries, so many people, including some new diabetics, have certainly been treated with BCG over the years. But no spontaneous regrowth of pancreatic beta cells with its associated improvement in blood glucose levels has ever been reported in any patients taking BCG. That there has been no spontaneous regrowth, even in very new patients, raises questions about the capacity of BCG to stop the autoimmunity.<\/p>\n

Finally, Faustman’s own research casts some doubt on the foundation of her own hypothesis. She and her co-workers have published a study which theorizes that the cause of type 1 diabetes is not autoimmune disease at all, but is rather the result of a perfectly normal, healthy immune system attacking as foreign tissue the diseased beta cells of the pancreas, which look foreign to the immune system because they contain abnormal nerves, which send out pain signals causing the immune system to suspect an infection where there is none. The actual cause of type 1 diabetes would then be some genetic or gestational problem which causes a malformation of the nerves associated with the beta cells of the pancreas, rather than a diseased immune system. If this is true, then altering the immune system with BCG and stimulating pancreatic regrowth with INGAP will only produce more diseased beta cells according to the blueprint set down already in the genes of the patient, and these beta cells will forever be re-attacked by the patient’s own immunity. The only solution to this would then be to give the patient extremely toxic immunosuppressive drugs for life, which causes more problems than it solves.<\/p>\n

Sources: G. Pittenger, et al, "The role of islet neogenesis associated protein (INGAP)," CURRENT PROTEIN PEPTIDE SCIENCE, vol. 10, no. 1, p. 37 (2009); A. Lonyai, et al, "Fetal Hox11 expression patterns predict defective target organs: a novel link between developmental biology and autoimmunity," IMMUNOLOGY AND CELL BIOLOGY, vol. 86, no. 4, p. 301 (2008)<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research by Dr. Denise Faustman offers the possibility of a more natural, biological approach to curing type 1 diabetes. It is based on the observation that the islet cells of diabetics continue to be regenerated throughout the life of the patient, but the autoimmunity continues to attack them, so the critical mass of islets is […]<\/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-159462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159462","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=159462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}