Skip to main content

TYPE 1 DIABETES DILEMMA

Stem cells are abound in medical research. Today I read an article on CNN [1] that claims blood stem cell transplantation gets Type-I diabetics off of insulin. I suppose that is good news for the countless young kids who are dealt this death sentence.

Yet, there is something more to this disease. This year, 2009, has found several research papers on the study of viral activity and Type-I diabetes [2], [3], [4], [5]. This makes me question whether or not any transfusion, transplantation, or any other replacement therapy has any merit for Type-I diabetes. No matter what you replace in the patient's body, the virus will continue to infect the new material, and the disease will continue to manifest.

What we really need to see isn't more snake-oil stem cell therapy that is costly and inconsequential, but rather real medical trials using virus-targeting therapies that are localized to the infected pancreas. These kids are doomed to an early death with this disease, and if it can be cured, and not just treated, with anti-viral medications, then why not start aggressive treatment trials?

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/15/stem.cells.diabetes/index.html
[2] http://www.childrenwithdiabetes.com/d_0n_120.htm
[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11919574
[4] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118782400/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
[5] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090305141639.htm
[6] http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/55/4/996

Popular posts from this blog

Host Species Barrier to Influenza Virus Infections

The title of this entry was taken from a paper written by Thijs Kuiken, Edward C. Holmes, John McCauley, Guus F. Rimmelzwaan, Catherine S. Williams, and Bryan T. Grenfell. This paper appeared in SCIENCE Volume 312, pp 394 – 397. If you have the gumption to really know how viral infections cross the species barrier, then this is the paper for you. It’s written as a “perspective” rather than as a technical publication, which means there isn’t a bunch of jargon in it. You can also contact the authors of the paper at t.kuiken@erasmusmc.nl . A particularly interesting quote taken from the paper: “It is well established that, as the proportion of susceptibles in the population, s , drops (as individuals become infected, then recover), the number of secondary cases per infection, R , also drops: R = s * R0 . If R is less than 1, as is currently the case for H5N1 virus in humans, an infection will not cause a major epidemic.” (pg. 312) The value, R0 , “is the number of secondary cases produced...
Read more

UNTITLED

I like people who can talk straight and take it standing. There's not enough straight talkers in the world, and certainly not enough in the USA. It seems as though our opinions are illegal if they are not in-line with the normative line of acceptance. That truly seems Orwellian to me. That said, though, this blog is more about race and ignorance than about the Thought Police. There does not exist a more sensitive and inflammatory topic than race . You should read the Wikipedia entry on race as it pertains to humans. It may enlighten you somewhat. The USA has two presidential candidates in its 2008 Presidential race. One of them is sort of a pinkish-white color, and the other is something of a brown color. The pinkish-white one has an American heritage with clear ancestry back to Northern Europeans. The brownish colored one has an Indonesian heritage with some suspected ancestry back to Africa, although he also has European ancestry. Call them whatever race you want. Where I have ...
Read more

The Spinning Brain

Intuition is a phenomenon of the biological brain that doesn't have any physical explanation. Many people experience intuition with varying degrees of success. There are a variety of theories regarding intuition [1] and some people regard intuition with much caution [2] . Yet, I am happily in the camp that has learned to respect my intuition as it has proven time and time again to be correct. Recently, though, I'd been thinking about intuition and soothsaying . There are many cases of people who claim to see the future, whatever that might be. Maybe there is something to be said about this mystical phenomenon. Maybe there is a real physical process at work that we just haven't thought of yet. To this end, I am proposing a theory about human intuition. This theory, though requires some background in quantum mechanics . Specifically, quantum entanglement . I'm not the only person who has theorized about quantum entanglement and its role in biological congnition and th...
Read more