New Research Reveals Contagious Type 2 Diabetes?
How do you get type 2 diabetes? Eating too much sugar?
No, sugar's not the cause. Sugar has cured type 2 diabetes. Maybe junk food then? The truth is, a cause has never been identified. Junk food and lifestyle are often the butts. However, now scientists suggest that type 2 diabetes may be transmissible.
Through a different looking angle, new research has revealed an original mechanism driving the disease that's similar to mad cow disease. The study headed by Claudio Soto at the McGovern Medical School in Houston, TX, and published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, show that type 2 diabetes has associations with transmissible neurodegenerative diseases.
Particularly, the researchers investigated the event of misfolding islet amyloid polypeptide protein (IAPP) that might cause type 2 diabetes.
Previous investigations show around 80 percent of type 2 diabetes patients have a pile of IAPP in the pancreas. This build up is believed to damage the beta cells, therefore, stopping them from producing the insulin needed by the body to lower blood sugar levels.
Thereafter, the team designed an experimental model where mice pancreases were genetically modified to produce human IAPP. Then, they were injected with misfolded IAPP. This experiment found that it triggered the formation of protein deposits in the mice's pancreases. Plus, the mice developed type 2 diabetes symptoms within weeks of misfolded IAPP being injected. The mice lost beta cells in their pancreas' and had high blood sugar levels.
Consequently, it looks like misfolded IAPP can cause protein clumps in a similar way to infectious disorders.
Soto advises, Considering the experimental nature of the models and conditions utilized in this study, the results should not be extrapolated to conclude that type 2 diabetes is a transmissible disease in humans without additional studies
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Maybe the contagious effects of type 2 diabetes might be limited to cell-to-cell rather than person-to-person. This is still unknown.