{"id":171452,"date":"2010-01-12T17:51:57","date_gmt":"2010-01-12T22:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.diabetesforums.com\/forum\/diabetes-complications\/47563-sex-hormones-diabetic-complications.html"},"modified":"2010-01-12T17:51:57","modified_gmt":"2010-01-12T22:51:57","slug":"sex-hormones-and-diabetic-complications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/171452","title":{"rendered":"Sex Hormones and Diabetic Complications"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>It is well established that children before the age of puberty\/menarche are relatively resistant to diabetic complications.  Also, experiments in the 1960s to control diabetic retinopathy by destroying the patient&#8217;s pituitary gland were found to stabilize retinal health, and through the pituitary-gonadal axis, the pituitary normally directs the production of sex hormones.  Experiments in animals showed that if the sex glands were surgically removed from subjects which had been artificially made diabetic, the animals were resistant to diabetic complications.  From these three facts, the evidence seemed to point to the idea that diabetic complications can only develop in the presence of sex hormones, but since it was regarded as unethical to test this by performing surgery on a human, the hypothesis could not be tested.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, nature herself provided us with a test.  Two female dizygotic twins were born without ovaries and thus with essentially no female sex hormones.  They were both type 1 diabetics, and they absolutely refused to make any effort to control their blood sugar.  They were followed for twenty years, during which time their HbA1c values were typically around 15% &#8212; a huge value.  But interestingly, despite this near record experience with poor blood sugar control, they exhibited no diabetic complications.<\/p>\n<p>This strongly suggests that if young type 1 diabetics, at the onset of their disease, had their sex glands surgically removed, they could live a life free of complications, the burdens of blood sugar management, and the potentially lethal threat of hypoglycemia episodes, since they could safely let their blood sugar run high.  They could also probably enjoy a normal life expectancy, rather than the shortened one most diabetics experience.  Although many surgeons would say that such an intervention is unethical, even if the patient wants it, I think it is a reasonable option that should be offered to every new diabetic.  If I were a newly diagnosed patient today, I would definitely choose such surgery.<\/p>\n<p>See: D. Bell, &quot;Lack of long-term diabetic complications in spite of poor glycemic control in twins with pure gonadal dysgenesis,&quot; Diabetes Care, vol. 18, no. 9, 1286 (1995)<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is well established that children before the age of puberty\/menarche are relatively resistant to diabetic complications. Also, experiments in the 1960s to control diabetic retinopathy by destroying the patient&#8217;s pituitary gland were found to stabilize retinal health, and through the pituitary-gonadal axis, the pituitary normally directs the production of sex hormones. Experiments in animals [&hellip;]<\/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-171452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171452","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=171452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}