A Toronto study (see also Sensory Nerve Discovery) suggests that we might have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of diabetes. The traditional understanding of type I diabetes is that it is an autoimmune disease in which the beta cells in the pancreas are killed. The beta cells are the ones that produce insulin, and, of course, no insulin means diabetes.
This story doesn’t seem to be correct, at least in mice. When doctors in Toronto injected capsaicin into diabetic mice’s pancreatic sensory nerves to kill the cells they were shocked to find their inlets began producing insulin normally. In another group of mice they injected a neuropeptide, which was being under produced in the diabetic mice’s pancreatic nerve cells, and got the same result. Some of these mice stayed healthy for as long as four months after one injection. They also discovered that the neuropeptide treatment curbed the insulin resistance of diabetes type II.
The new theory is that the beta cells aren’t dead, but that diabetes type I is actually the result of malfunctioning pain neurons that are preventing the beta cells from operating properly. And malfunctioning nerves also seem to be playing some sort of crucial role in type II diabetes.
Tags: Autoimmune Diseases, Diabetes