We are in the 21st century. A new millennium and a hope that new discoveries, innovations would help us thwart diseases like cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia etc. Actually, if we leave the mental illness aside for a minute as the science studying mind/brain is pretty nascent; then one would ponder why we are still years if not decades away from finding a credible cure for diseases like cancer, diabetes and HIV! Right now we only treat diseases like diabetes not cure them………………….
Let’s talk about diabetes, type 2 to be precise for a moment. The best medicine for decades to treat (not cure, mind it!) has been metformin. This humble drug has shown tremendous resilience in terms of safety and efficacy and is and probably would be the first line of therapy for years to come!
The current or upcoming therapies for diabetes mostly revolve around two aspects – a) increasing insulin secretion (sulphonylureas take the cake here) or b) increasing insulin sensitivity (PPARs/metformin etc). Even the new ones like the GLP-1s or DPP-IV inhibitors ultimately increase insulin secretion though independent of glucose concentration (better than sulphonylureas!). But to me these are just like “cosmetic” drugs treating the symptom not the cause and I feel that we have still not properly understood this disease. In this context, I would like to share a new discovery that can change the perception of how we look at type 2 diabetes. New research has suggested that the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes may be linked to an immune system reaction gone awry. Till now, we have been looking at type 2 diabetes as a metabolic disease and immune system malaise is mostly associated with the other cousin of diabetes , the type 1 diabetes. Now, if the above said observation is indeed found to be credible in subsequent research then it would mean a tremendous paradigm shift in type 2 diabetes research. I guess, this kind of observation/research is the step in the right direction to understand the cause of the disease.
Probably, joining the pieces of the diabetes puzzle through innovative and fresh thinking is the right approach to finding a “cure” for this scourge rather than trying to better the current therapies to “treat” the disease.
