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February 13, 2012
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Julie Deardorff : Researchers say antioxidants may not be that effective and could do more harm than good
Mark Clayton: How did Anonymous hackers eavesdrop on FBI and Scotland Yard?
February 3, 2012
Edmund Sanders : Israeli official says Iran is creating missile that could reach East Coast of US
Victoria Kim: Immigrant-smuggling ring used black drivers to avoid racial profiling
February 2, 2012
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Reza Kahlili : Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: What Obama doesn't grasp about striking deals with Tehran
Tina Susman: For woodchuck rescuer, every day is Groundhog Day
February 1, 2012
Brian Bennett: US officials see increasing threat of domestic attack from Iran
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January 31, 2012
January 30, 2012
Paul Richter and Ramin Mostaghim: Misreading Teheran's limits -- deadly and economically devastating as they may be -- is a risk administration, Europe seem willing to take
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Meg Handley: Banks Revamping Rewards Programs to Woo Customers
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Yochonon Donn: In liberal New York City, fervently-Orthodox Jews may soon be getting a district to call their own
Jeannine Stein: An inflated ego and thinking you're 'all that' doesn't just make others sick of you, it can make you ill
Katy Hopkins: New budget rules may affect how much money you get for college
January 26, 2012
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Jeannine Stein: Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report
January 25, 2012
Richard Simon: House passes two bills endorsing the use of religious symbols at military memorials
Fred Weir: Putin: Multiethnic Russia cannot survive as a US-style 'melting pot'; must find its own way
Susan Johnston: 5 Sneaky Coupon Strategies Consumers Should Watch Out For
January 24, 2012
Carol Clark: The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'
Caroline B. Glick: America lost most in 'Arab Spring'. Sadly, many voters still don't grasp the extent
Warren Richey: Drug criminal scores win in GPS ruling from conservative-leaning high court
Erika Bolstad: Black conservatives gather to talk about gaining strength
January 23, 2012
Melissa Dribben: Jewish voters to play a key role in Florida's Republican primary
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Ali Safi: U.S. envoy gives Taliban terms for peace talks
January 19, 2012
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Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: No-kidding red lines: U.S. response to an Iranian nuke may be bluster, but Israel's won't be
David G. Savage: They sued their principals after slandering them online --- now the cases are headed to the Supreme Court
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January 13, 2012
Ben Lynfield: Israeli lawmakers move to annex Jewish Judea, one museum at a time
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January 12, 2012
Warren Richey: Landmark Supreme Court ruling a 'resounding win' for religious groups
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Katy Hopkins : Consider This Before You Pay for an Online Degree
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January 11, 2012
Shari Roan: Millions of atrial fibrillation sufferers at risk for devastating, but preventable, stroke
Tom Hussain: Pakistan -- recipient of more than $21 billion in civilian and military aid -- speeds pursuit of Iranian pipeline, defying US
David G. Savage: High court signals it won't be loosening TV's 'indecency' rules
Stephen Ceasar: Oklahoma's Islamic law amendment can't go into effect, court rules
January 10, 2012
Reza Kahlili: From an ex-CIA spy: US must exploit new split in Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Karen Kaplan: Study: Nicotine replacement products ineffective when used in real-life situations
January 9, 2012
Michael Doyle: Put through legal hell over dream home, couple fought back hard --- all the way to Supreme Court
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Jewish World Review
Researcher reports intriguing diabetes breakthrough
By
Jeffrey Weiss
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT)
A Dallas-based researcher says he's pulled off a medical first: successfully treating mice and rats dying of insulin-dependent diabetes without using insulin.
Dr. Roger Unger, chair of diabetes research at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, is quick to warn that practical applications, if any, are years away. But the research team he headed used high levels of leptin, a substance naturally produced by fat cells, to somehow reverse the otherwise fatal effects of diabetes.
If the experiment is repeated in other labs, and then if leptin can be adapted to treat humans, it might offer the first alternate to the multiple insulin injections used by millions of people who have type 1 diabetes, Unger said.
How surprising was the result of the experiment?
"It would be like finding aliens landing in your backyard," Unger said.
It's not easy for diabetes to surprise Unger. He's been a top researcher for decades with a long list of honors from many major diabetes-related organizations. At 84, he's still someone that others in the field pay attention to.
His latest findings were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, titled "Making insulin-deficient type 1 diabetic rodents thrive without insulin," will get plenty of attention, said Dr. Rohit N. Kulkarni, a researcher at the Joslin Diabetes Center and professor at Harvard Medical School who is also investigating the effects of leptin.
"I think it's very interesting and intriguing - with an emphasis on the latter," he said. "It's quite unexpected."
Leptin may blunt the short-term impact of Type 1 diabetes - the rapid weight loss and altered blood chemistry that make the untreated disease fatal. It may also help control the longer-term effects of the disease caused by abnormally high levels of sugar in the bloodstream.
But the results reported in this new paper offer almost as many questions as they do answers, Unger said. And he figures the initial reaction to the results from many other researchers will be negative, "just like mine was," he said.
Why is it such a surprise? Ever since 1921, when researchers first linked what is now known as type 1 diabetes to a lack of insulin, doctors have assumed that the only successful treatment replaced insulin, usually through multiple daily injections. This new experiment rejuvenated mice and rats without using insulin.
"There's not a human being who knows anything about diabetes who would have said they would get better without insulin," Unger said.
Specialized cells in the pancreas called beta cells respond to the level of sugar in the bloodstream by producing insulin. The hormone has at least two functions:
It acts like a key to a locking gas cap, letting many kinds of cells absorb sugar from the blood to use for fuel.
Insulin also sits on the opposite side of a biochemical teeter-totter from a hormone called glucagon. Glucagon tells liver cells to dump storage supplies of sugar into the bloodstream, providing more fuel as needed. At higher levels, it signals cells to convert amino acids and fats into fuel - basically telling the body to "burn" muscle and fat.
In Type 1 diabetes, which affects about a million people in the United States, the body's immune system mistakenly kills the beta cells - and the ability of the body to produce insulin.
Without insulin on the other side of the teeter-totter, excess glucagon over-triggers the consumption of muscle and fat, which produces the wasting and rapidly fatal symptoms associated with untreated type 1 diabetes, Unger said.
In the experiment reported in the new paper, Unger's team injected genetically modified viruses that infected the rodents' liver cells and turned them into leptin-producers.
In a matter of days, the wasting effects of excess glucagon stopped and blood sugar levels dropped near normal. After a few weeks, the leptin levels went down and the blood sugar levels went back up - but not nearly as high as for untreated mice. And the otherwise fatal high-glucagon symptoms never returned, even after almost a year.
A few scientists have thought that leptin was involved with the balance between insulin and glucagon and a few earlier experiments had used leptin along with insulin on rodents, but this is the first to show results without insulin, Unger said.
"Leptin seems to do everything that insulin does - and with a more prolonged effect," Unger said.
Among the many questions left for researchers:
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Will the leptin work without the potentially risky modified viruses? The next planned rodent experiment would use simple leptin injections.
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Will the effects fade over time? Some of the rodents from the earlier tests are still alive and the researchers are watching.
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Does the leptin control blood sugars enough to stave off the long-term effects of diabetes? If not, Unger says there are other possible adjunct treatments to consider.
But there are no promises that this work will ever produce practical treatments, Unger said. He has been disappointed before. In the 1970s, he worked with another protein called somatostatin that seemed to offer a new treatment for diabetes, but the effect was too short-lived.
The bottom line for Unger is that this research provides new choices for others searching for ways to treat type 1 diabetes.
"Over the years we all began to believe it was insulin or nothing," he said. "We hope this will open a door that was previously closed and inspire exploration for new and effective alternatives."
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© 2008, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
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