Joslin researchers have identified immune cells that promote growth of beta cells in type 1 diabetes. This study provides further evidence of a changed role for immune cells in type 1 diabetes pathology. The study will be published online today and will appear in the January issue of Diabetes.
When mice ate a diet of 25 percent extra sugar – the mouse equivalent of a healthy human diet plus three cans of soda daily – females died at twice the normal rate and males were a quarter less likely to hold territory and reproduce, according to a toxicity test developed at the University of Utah.
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a group of rare autosomal recessive disorders affecting the endocrine system. The disease affects production pathways for glucocorticoids (GCs) and mineralocorticoids (MCs) such as cortisol and aldosterone. In affected individuals, cortisol levels do not normalize, resulting in a runaway steroidogenesis process and an overabundance of androgens (male sex hormones). Individuals with CAH develop adrenal hyperactivity and abnormally large adrenal glands (hyperplasia). Symptoms may be mild or severe and presentations may vary from ambiguous female genitalia, underdeveloped male genitalia, precocious pseudopuberty, skeletal malformations, to a very serious salt-wasting crisis. Some females may present with symptoms that resemble polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), displaying unusual excessive hair growth, irregular or absent menstrual cycles, and anovulation (lack of an ovum release during menstruation).
There is a vast city hidden inside your body. You might not be directly aware of its inhabitants, but it’s quite likely you owe your health to them. These inhabitants are microbes, of course. Hundreds of species of them inhabit us, and the term “microbiome” refers to their collective genes. Even though scientists are just beginning to map it, many researchers believe the microbiome affects our health—and when it’s unbalanced it predisposes us to numerous autoimmune diseases. Is our sterile Western environment—which has rid our bodies of many kinds of bacteria—to blame for this?
The role of dietary fructose in the development of obesity and fatty liver diseases remains controversial, with previous studies indicating that the problems resulted from fructose and a diet too high in calories.
However, a new study conducted in an animal model at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center showed that fructose rapidly caused liver damage even without weight gain. The researchers found that over the six-week study period liver damage more than doubled in the animals fed a high-fructose diet as compared to those in the control group.
Straight off the British Isles is another import. It’s not the Beatles or the Rolling Stones; it’s “the fasting diet” and it’s hot. The diet was covered recently by a BBC documentary.
It purports to help patients lose weight quickly by slashing their dietary intake on 2 non-consecutive days per week. This is not a total fast, mind you, just a serious reduction in calories on those 2 days: 600 calories for men and 500 calories for women. To sum it up, for 5 days you eat what you normally consume (don’t gorge, obviously), and on 2 days during the week, not in a row, you do a reduced-calorie fast.
Here’s a wake-up call for snorers: Snoring may put you at a greater risk than those who are overweight, smoke or have high cholesterol to have thickening or abnormalities in the carotid artery, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
The increased thickening in the lining of the two large blood vessels that supply the brain with oxygenated blood is a precursor to atherosclerosis, a hardening of the arteries responsible for many vascular diseases.
The prospective cohort study tracked 843 women who were diagnosed with gestational diabetes between 1996 and 2003 at Cheil General Hospital in Seoul, South Korea. About 12.5 percent of the women developed Type 2 diabetes within two months of delivering their babies. During the next decade, the number of women diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes continued to grow at a rate of 6.8 percent a year.
In the United States, the diet and weight loss industry is nearly a $61 billion enterprise. In some instances, its purveyors are modern-day equivalents of traveling snake oil salesmen. For a case in point, the new Hollywood diet craze—the HCG fat-burning supplement—promises that with daily sublingual applications of a couple of drops of their product, people can burn up to 2 pounds of fat per day.
