Since diabetes rears up on SE from time to time,

C is water-soluble and does its antiscorbutic thing through merely eating or drinking citrus, so why not diabetes? We'll have to wait for the medical heavyweights to tell us.

if Linus Pauling was right all along and megadoses of vitamin C is the cureall for everything?

Diana

a college chemistry prof of mine admitted that the vitamin C stuff and other of Pauling's ideas seemed crackpot by mainstream standards. He also pointed out Pauling's track record and advised betting against him. He said that others had looked down on Pauling's research before- like the chemical insights that got him his science Nobel and contributed to Watson and Crick's.

Later, of course, he became the only person to win a Nobel in two different fields. His "peacenik" views, which kept him from traveling to England when Watson was appropriating Rosalind Franklin's x-ray diffraction pictures, are now also more mainstream and accepted.

medical knowledge to judge it. That business of the 250mg absorption could explain why IV application is effective. And almost any vitamin has negative side effects in large doses.

A note about New Scientist: Their articles tend to be on cutting-edge research, but filtered through a mainstream science mindset, so it's more tenable than the tabloid stuff.

Out here in First Nations country the diabetes rate is high. The genetic predisposition is there, but isn't the major factor; mostly poor dietary choices and/or poverty. There's a campaign on many of the reservations to 'return to the Three Sisters'. (Corn, beans, squash) In Custer's day, Indian deaths tended to be from starvation or Army bullets, not diabetes. I've seen Apache and Navajo school kids swarm to the food machines at recess like buffalo to a water hole. There are campaigns also to remove junk food from schools, but it's hard for a rural district to turn down the revenue that Coke graciously provides. (In many cases they can have the Minute Maid products, but only if they keep the Coke. That is changing, though.)

"Provided there's enough money for the research, we live in a time of unprecedented and exciting promise"
'Dontcha know there's a war on?'

I forget the exact rate of diabetes among native Americans, but I think it's well over 50%. It's that Indian blood that most have which makes Mexicans and Mexican-Americans so high-risk for diabetes. Incidentally, I wonder what the rate is among native Tibetans? When we were in tibet, we noticed striking similarities in facial structure, costumes, the use of the "backwards Swastika," and some other elements with both North and South American Indians. For one example, in my office at work I have a circular painting of a yak and a Tibetan in what looks for all the world like an Andean costume, and there are threee tassels before. When I ask most people where they think it comes from, the usual answer is that it's an unusual form of dream-catcher!
-- Dave K.

epidemic, as well. Many Hispanics here have Native blood and Moorish, since here the background tends to be Spanish, not Mexican. I believe Africans have a predisposition, too. Plus the levels of poverty abet bad diet choices in the home.

I was teaching a middle school science class by coincidence when Channel 1 had a special on childhood diabetes. I segu

"primitive clothing designers" not familiar with such advanced ideas as the Spring fashion shows and planned obsolescence.

The similarities of other customs are also explainable, but only under the Forbidden Head. Even among those disinclined to believe the Noah story there are many who have noted, and assumed the significance of, the many cross-like emblems in religious history. Some trace it back to Babel's founder. You can find much of this in Mankind's Search for God, published by ... oh, I forget who.

BTW there's some new and probably final word on Oetzi; looks like he may have been ambushed by a determined assailant. Perhaps a tribal or clan matter.

I have not kept up on the basic science stuff as much as I used to so I did not realize how many diseases are believed to be caused by problems with protein folding. When I was in medical school the notion that disease could result from protein folding was not really in the mainstream. Prions were still a novel infectious agent that nobody really understood. There has been a lot of progress since then.

I think, though, that it would be easy to misinterpret the article Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus as a Conformational Disease. The authors make a good case that the progressive failure of the pancreas is related to protein folding problems, but pancreatic failure is clearly not the only (and perhaps not the major) cause of complications in diabetes. As the authors pointed out in the article, the phenomenon of insulin resistance is critical to the development of diabetes and is not presently believed to be a result of protein folding errors. The primary cause of diabetic complications is not the loss of pancreatic function per se but rather the damage that excessive sugar does to the brain, eyes, kidneys, nerves, immune system and vascular system. IOW, eliminating the protein mis-folding in the pancreas would not necessarily prevent diabetes (although it might make diabetes easier to treat) and it would not prevent the development of diabetic complications.

It may be that some diabetic complications are a result of protein folding problems in the target organs, but I don't think anybody really knows that for certain. High glucose levels do produce abnormal proteins as a result of glycosylation, but I do not know how they damage the tissues in the end organs. Maybe we will find out that the complications from diabetes are the result of protein folding problems ... but we don't know that yet.

As for the Vit C and Vit E ... It will be interesting to see how that plays out. As you know, large trials of anti-oxidant therapy have not produced the improvements we expected. If Vit C and Vit E can reduce the rate of pancreatic failure in diabetics that would be good news indeed but I would like to see large scale data before recommending it.

New Scientist reports on good research IMO but their headline writers were trained at the National Enquirer. IOW the research may not ever pan out as a "cure", but a scientist in that field would be well advised to look into it.

To me, having seen long-term Type I in my family and near-family, the best part was the possibility of damage prevention and maybe reversal, as I'm sure you would welcome as well. I'm sure you guys are tired of treating blindness and gangrene in patients who have the diabetes under control.

Same with Dave's 'small experiment in an obscure place', although the concentration of diabetics there makes the results worth perhaps more. BTW I have some evidence that the BIA and USPHS medical and hospital facilities out this way are greatly improved from the old days. If so, then probably there's plenty of diabetes research on the reservations here. In any case, our big problem (incl. the cities, with their Hispanic and Black populations) is lifestyle.

Gotta go now; just dribbled some of my Twinkie on the keyboard.

No, I don't think the authors of that article believe that most of the diabetic complications are due to protein misfolding -- they were speaking mainly of the pancreatic failure due to those IPA aggregates. And unfortunately, I doubt that antioxidant therapy will help in that phenomenon -- it's main benefit is with such nonetheless serious complications as nephropathy, retinopathy, and cardiovascular complications. Incidentally, for a preview of what's coming down the pike in terms of really effective drugs against these diseases (apparently one drug helps all), see this abstract of an editorial by Claudio Soto, Director of UTMB's new Mitchell Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research. Incidentally, I forgot to mention Huntington's as another protein misfolding disease (and so are the other poly-Glu repeat diseases). He has a peptide that actually reverses misfolded protein aggregates (as do some other labs), and in animals blocks progression of the diseases.

-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
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