Inflammatory Ideas
New thoughts about causes of diabetes
Eat right, exercise regularly, maintain a healthy weight, and you can reduce your risk of diabetes as you get older. Since following that advice is significantly harder than giving it, more and more people are developing type II diabetes, and researchers continue to explore its underlying causes in the hope of developing effective therapies. The task is more urgent than ever because the average age of people being diagnosed with the disease is falling as the U.S. population gets fatter. Overall, according to the American Diabetes Association, about 10 million people in the United States know they have type II diabetes, while more than 5 million with the disease remain undiagnosed.
Recently, scientists searching for causes of type II diabetes have begun to focus on the immune process called inflammation. In inflammation, the body responds to injury by sending specialized blood cells to damaged areas where they destroy invaders and clean up dead and dying cells. In recent years, scientists have discovered that this process plays a role in a surprising number of diseases (SN: 6/14/97, p. 374: https://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc97/6_14_97/bob1.htm). Now, they’re gathering evidence that inflammation precedes and predicts diabetes. Previous research had already linked inflammation to heart disease and obesity, which are both common in people with diabetes.