Type 2 diabetes can take years to develop, and if caught early it is an entirely preventable disease. A new study suggests a particular blood biomarker could be used to identify those patients on the way to a diabetes diagnosis but yet to display minyak atsiri symptoms of disease.
Currently, doctors performing routine health checks often measure a patient’s blood sugar levels. When those blood sugar levels are elevated but below the official threshold for type 2 diabetes, one can be diagnosed with a condition called prediabetes.
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However, not all patients with prediabetes will go on to develop type 2 diabetes. In fact, only around 50 percent of those with prediabetes will progress to diabetes over a 10-year follow-up. So beyond blood-glucose tracking, how can doctors identify those patients closest to developing clinical type 2 diabetes?
One of the main pathological characteristics of diabetes is the impairment of insulin secretion from beta cells in the pancreas. As type 2 diabetes progresses, these beta cells become increasingly damaged, and by the time the disease is clearly diagnosable patients tend to have lost around half of those crucial cells.
“Identifying the transition from pre-diabetes to diabetes is complex, because the status of the affected cells, which are scattered in very small quantities in the core of an organ located under the liver, the pancreas, is impossible to assess quantitatively by non-invasive investigations,” explained Pierre Maechler, lead researcher on the new study. “We therefore opted for an alternative strategy: to find a molecule whose levels in the blood would be associated with the functional mass of these beta cells in order to indirectly detect their alteration at the pre-diabetes stage, before the appearance of any symptoms.”
So instead tracking prediabetes by simply looking at blood glucose levels, Maechler set out to find a biomarker that indicated the deterioration of pancreatic beta cells. Scanning thousand of different molecular biomarkers in a variety of mouse models of diabetes the researchers homed in on specific sugar called 1,5-anhydroglucitol.
And in this newly published study the researchers report the biomarker does indeed correlate with diabetes in humans. Across several different analyses the study demonstrated low levels of 1,5-anhydroglucitol could be associated with deficits in pancreatic beta cells.