Featured series 
Tag: Diabetes
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Health
Study shows different insulin signaling components control glucose and lipid metabolism in the liver
Insulin uses two distinct mechanisms to control glucose and the metabolism of blood fats (lipids) in the liver, a new Joslin Diabetes Center-led study has discovered. Failures in each of these networks can lead to serious health problems: the breakdown of glucose metabolism that can lead to type 2 diabetes, and the malfunction of lipid…
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Health
Study provides first physiological evidence that insulin is critical for blood vessel formation
For people with type 2 diabetes, the death rate from a first heart attack is two to three times the death rate of patients without the disease. Similarly, patients with diabetes and ischemic (reduced blood flow) heart disease have a much higher mortality rate than the general population. Now, a team of researchers at Joslin…
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Arts & Culture
Brigham pilot program connects people with family histories
A Harvard Medical School instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is spearheading a pilot project to encourage Brigham employees to gather detailed family health histories to give health care officials an edge fighting inherited diseases.
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Health
Internet discussion group provides an inspiring, supportive ‘oasis’ for people with diabetes, Joslin study shows
A study that appears in the November/December 2005 issue of The Diabetes Educator examined the impact of Joslin’s Online Discussion Boards – forums in which people with diabetes can find information and share thoughts and experiences on specific diabetes issues. Established in 1998, the free service on Joslin’s Web site (http:// www.joslin.org/) allows people from…
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Health
Moms who breastfeed may be protected from type 2 diabetes
Researchers have demonstrated that breastfeeding a child for one year may reduce a woman’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 15 percent. This study appeared in the Nov. 23, 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “We’ve known for a long time that breastfeeding is good for babies,” said lead author…
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Health
Study shows new compound may reduce risk of vision loss in patients with diabetes
The PKC-Diabetic Retinopathy Study (DRS) was designed to evaluate the safety and effect of an oral treatment, RBX, on retinopathy progression or visual loss in patients with moderately severe to very severe nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy. In the study, patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes received either RBX or a placebo over three to…
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Health
Insulin prods development of type 1 diabetes
Joslin Diabetes Center researchers Diane Mathis’s and Christophe Benoist’s finding that the lymph node draining the pancreas was intrinsic to the autoimmune response in mice made David Hafler, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wonder if something similar was happening in people. In the May 12, 2005 Nature, he and his colleagues…
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Campus & Community
Low-fat dairy may help reduce risk of type 2 diabetes
The consumption of low-fat dairy foods may reduce men’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a study in the May 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. The report from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) – the first large-scale, prospective…
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Campus & Community
Researchers ID antigen for type 1 diabetes
Type 1 diabetes, diagnosed in children and adults, is an autoimmune disease that occurs when the pancreas no longer produces insulin. Diabetes, which ranks as the fifth-deadliest disease in the United States, has reached critical proportions, affecting 18.2 million people, or 6.3 percent of the population. To address what many consider a growing epidemic, scientists…
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Health
Study finds men who consume more dairy products have lower incidence of diabetes
A report from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) – the first large-scale, prospective examination of a relationship between dairy intake and diabetes risk – analyzes data from the HSPH-based Health Professionals Follow-up Study. “Our study found that men consuming higher levels of…
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Health
Low-fat dairy foods may help reduce risk of type 2 diabetes
“Our study found that men consuming higher levels of dairy products, especially low-fat dairy foods, had a significantly lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes during a 12-year period,” says Hyon Choi, M.D., Dr.PH, director of Outcomes Research in the MGH Rheumatology Unit and the paper’s lead author. Recent research has implied that dairy foods…
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Health
Joslin Diabetes Center scientists find genetic defects in immunological tolerance
The genetic defect keeps the body from properly dealing with “errant” immune cells that it normally eliminates by a process called immunological tolerance. These immune cells then attack the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, mistaking them for foreign invaders. This is the first step in the onset of type 1 diabetes. The pancreatic beta…
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Health
Poor prenatal nutrition permanently damages function of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas
To understand the increased risk factor, the researchers mated ordinary mice and separated the mothers into a control group that ate as much chow as they wanted throughout their pregnancies and another group that was fully nourished during the first two weeks but undernourished during the third week. At birth, the second group’s babies weighed…
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Health
Scientists discover “master switch” that triggers insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes
“We zeroed in on a factor called NF-kB,” said principal investigator Steven E. Shoelson, M.D., Ph.D., Helen and Morton Adler Chair and head of the Section on Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Joslin, and professor of Medicine at Harvard Medicine School. Shoelson said that activating NF-kB in the livers of laboratory animals incited inflammatory responses.…
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Health
Anti-psychotic drugs may be associated with increased risk of diabetes in schizophrenia patients
According to the article’s background information, “Recently, the newer ‘atypical’ antipsychotic agents have been linked to several forms of morbidity, including obesity; hyperlipidemia; type 2 diabetes mellitus; and diabetic ketoacidosis [a severe complication of diabetes].” David C. Henderson, M.D., from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues evaluated 36 non-obese outpatients with schizophrenia…
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Health
Coffee cuts diabetes risk
More than 125,000 study participants who were free of diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease at the start of a study were selected from the on-going Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses Health Study. Some 41,934 men were tracked from 1986 to 1998 and 84,276 women from1980 to 1998 via food…
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Health
Dramatic gains shown with moderate weight loss, exercise
A study of 35 obese people included three groups of volunteers; all were obese and had a body mass index above 30 kg/m2 and had insulin resistance. The first group in the study did not have diabetes; the second group had a condition known as impaired glucose tolerance and was at high risk for developing…
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Health
Regeneration of insulin-producing islets may lead to diabetes cure
Type 1 diabetes develops when the body’s immune cells mistakenly attack the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas. As islet cells die, insulin production ceases, and blood sugar levels rise, damaging organs throughout the body. Cells from an unexpected source, the spleen, appear to develop into insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells in adult animals. This surprising…
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Health
Generous portions of TV make women fat
The first study to compare the effects of inactivity on obesity and diabetes concludes that being a couch potato significantly raises the risk of both diseases. “Our data provide strong evidence that sedentary behaviors, especially prolonged TV watching, are directly related to the risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes,” reports Frank Hu, leader of…
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Health
Researchers shed light on genetic defects that cause diabetes
New findings by researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center visualize the protein that is mutated in most individuals having a form of diabetes called Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY). “These findings, reported in the November 2002 issue of the journal Molecular Cell, provide a clear picture of why mutations cause diabetes and potential avenues…
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Health
Nuts lower diabetes risk
Women in a study who reported eating nuts at least five times per week reduced their risk of type 2 diabetes by almost 30 percent compared to those who rarely or never ate nuts. The researchers also found that women in the study who frequently ate peanut butter reduced their risk for type 2 diabetes…
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Health
Key gene discovered for obesity and diabetes
Obesity is closely associated with insulin resistance and is one of the leading risk factors for type 2 diabetes. Both affect more than 50 percent of the U.S. population. Little has been known about the molecular mechanisms linking these two metabolic diseases. Both are associated with a wide range of inflammatory molecular activity in fatty…
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Health
Diabetes treatment linked to increased blood pressure
Type II diabetes accounts for the majority of cases of the disease, and is a huge public health problem: As many as 16 million individuals in the United States have Type II diabetes, which puts them at risk for a number of serious complications, including stroke and heart disease. Although diabetes can often be controlled…
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Health
Researchers uncover remaining critical insulin gene regulatory factor
Scientists have known the identity of two genes that can influence the ability of insulin genes to trigger insulin production in the beta cells of the pancreas. Through subsequent research it has been demonstrated that these two genes are at least partially responsible for a form of diabetes called maturity onset diabetes of the young…
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Health
Increased intake of dairy products may help reduce risk of insulin resistance
Milk intake has decreased significantly over the past three decades while the prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes has increased. The authors of a Harvard research study note that for most of the past 30 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Heart Association have recommended low-fat diets for the prevention and…
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Health
Death protein may cause neural tube defects in babies of diabetic mothers
A research report provides a possible explanation for a class of birth defects that appears to be on the rise. A protein normally involved in programmed cell death may, as a consequence of high blood sugar, mistakenly tell cells of the nascent neural tube to die. Even with good control of diabetes, the risk for…
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Health
Study links Western dietary pattern with greater risk for type 2 diabetes in men
About 16 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, which can cause blindness, kidney failure, and heart disease. Now researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health have linked a diet high in consumption of red meat, processed meat, high-fat dairy products and refined grains, combined with obesity and inactivity, with a high risk for type…
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Health
Can weight loss decrease heart disease in type 2 diabetes?
Can weight loss decrease heart disease in type 2 diabetes? That’s the question being asked by Harvard researchers and others based at three Boston medical centers. In a nationwide study conducted locally at Massachusetts General Hospital, Joslin Diabetes Center and Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center, researchers will gain valuable information about the relationship between weight loss…