Diabetes

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

Randy Jackson is known for providing measured critiques to aspiring singers on Fox's "American Idol," but in his private life, he's had to analyze something entirely different: After a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes nine years ago, the music industry veteran needed to reevaluate his diet and lifestyle. Jackson went from piling his plates high with fried food and counting riding in a golf cart as exercise to eating veggies with every meal and working out every day. He talked to us about how his diagnosis changed his life and how he hopes to help others.

Researchers have some reassuring news for the legions of coffee drinkers who can't get through the day without a latte, cappuccino, iced mocha, double-shot of espresso or a plain old cuppa joe: That coffee habit may help you live longer. A new study that tracked the health and coffee consumption of more than 400,000 older adults for nearly 14 years found that java drinkers were less likely to die during the study than their counterparts who eschewed the brew. In fact, men and women who averaged four or five cups of coffee per day had the lowest risk of death, according to a report in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Resveratrol, the plant compound found in red wine and reputed to have anti-aging effects, including protection against cancer and diabetes, has just had a "told-you-so" moment. Resveratrol 's discoverer, the embattled Harvard professor who hopes it will point the way to new anti-aging drugs, long argued that the phytonutrient worked its magic by "turning on" the SIRT1 gene. The SIRT1 gene, one of a family of genes, the Sirtuins, is believed to control the good function and longevity of cells and, in turn, of their host.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

The TATTOO machine's loud buzzing would shock the hairs on my upper arm in different directions if they hadn't just been shaved off to create a smooth surface. A little doubt settles in my gut -- something permanent is about to be drawn on my body -- but there's no sneaking out now. Besides, the tattoo needle is supposed to help me come to terms with the type I normally use. As the 10-year anniversary of my diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes approached earlier this year, I realized I still hadn't accepted the fact I was a diabetic.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

Resveratrol, the plant compound found in red wine and reputed to have anti-aging effects, including protection against cancer and diabetes, has just had a "told-you-so" moment. Resveratrol 's discoverer, the embattled Harvard professor who hopes it will point the way to new anti-aging drugs, long argued that the phytonutrient worked its magic by "turning on" the SIRT1 gene. The SIRT1 gene, one of a family of genes, the Sirtuins, is believed to control the good function and longevity of cells and, in turn, of their host.

Los Angeles has one of the highest diabetes-related amputation rates in the country. Yet vascular surgeon Dr. George Andros can't seem to draw enough attention to the problem, which has skyrocketed not just here but nationally. "It's not sexy," he acknowledges. "Who cares about diabetic feet? It has no sizzle." Over the last 15 years, the U.S. rate of foot amputations from complications of diabetes has soared, approaching 100,000 annually, according to studies and government statistics.

Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should. But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates ? not fat ? for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension. "Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Too little sleep - or disrupted sleep - seems to increase the risk of diabetes and obesity, scientists found during a recent lab experiment. Orfeu Buxton, a neuroscientist and sleep researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, placed 21 test subjects in isolation for nearly six weeks.  For the three weeks before the experiment began, he and his colleagues instructed the volunteers to spend 10 hours in bed, to make sure they got an optimal level of sleep.   Then the subjects moved into dimly lit, isolated suites in the laboratory, where the research team removed "time cues" and otherwise disrupted the volunteers' sleep, allowing them only about five hours of per 28-hour period, scattered over various times of the day and the night.  Participants were not allowed visitors or Internet access.  One person came in with 20 years' worth of photo-stuffed boxes and came out with well-organized photo albums, Buxton said.  Another wrote a long paper.

Pregnant women might now have one more good reason to watch their diet and exercise: A new study links autism and developmental delays in young children to metabolic conditions, like obesity and diabetes, in their mothers. The findings, published in Monday's edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that women who had diabetes or hypertension or were obese were 1.61 times as likely as healthy women to have children with autism spectrum disorders. They also were 2.35 times as likely to have children with developmental delays.

Metformin is a workhorse drug for people with diabetes. It helps patients control their blood sugar and makes them more sensitive to insulin. But soon, metformin may take on a new role fighting cancer. Results of a preliminary study presented Saturday at the American Assn. for Cancer Research's annual meeting in Chicago suggest metformin slowed the growth of prostate cancer tumors. The study involved 22 men with prostate cancer. All of them were scheduled to have their prostates removed, and some of them took metformin for about seven weeks beforehand.

A pair of landmark studies demonstrated that weight-loss surgery may be the best solution for Type 2 diabetics with poor control over their blood sugar. So, now what? Experts say that diabetes care is likely to undergo a profound shift. But before diabetics get in line for space on the operating table, a lot of questions need to be answered. Not least of those, say clinicians, is who will do those operations, how well and for how much. Bariatric surgery has exploded in recent years, and with that growth have come concerns about quality of care and patient safety.

On Monday, researchers reported in two new clinical trials that several types of weight-loss surgery were more effective at controlling blood-sugar levels in obese people with diabetes than the usual care regimen of diet and drugs. In many cases, as Los Angeles Times reporter Melissa Healy wrote Monday (see related items link), surgical procedures to reduce the size and sometimes the placement of the stomach often allowed subjects to discontinue diabetes medications within weeks.

In findings that promise radical changes in the care of the 20 million U.S. patients with Type 2 diabetes, two new clinical trials have shown that weight-loss surgery brings about dramatically greater improvement of blood sugar control in obese diabetics than standard diabetes care. In both studies, even rigorously supervised regimens of diet, exercise and medications failed to bring blood sugar under good control after a year or more. In contrast, two teams of researchers - one in Italy, the other in the United States - reported that surgical procedures to reduce the size and sometimes the placement of the stomach often allowed subjects to discontinue diabetes medications within weeks.

At age 53 and 356 pounds, Laura Bauden had it all ? Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression and anger. She was taking Avandia for her diabetes and was on the brink of starting insulin injections. With her health in a downward spiral, she feared she might not be around to see her grandchildren grow up. "It was a midlife crisis, the choice to live or die," she recalls. When a therapist recommended she try Lindora Clinic, which guides patients through a medically based weight-loss program, Bauden signed up for an intense 10-week session.

How can you tell if you or someone you know is having a heart attack? Sometimes the symptoms can be surprisingly subtle. "They can be very different from person to person, between women and men and even within an individual who has more than one heart attack," says Dr. David Rizik, director of Interventional Cardiology for Scottsdale Healthcare Hospitals, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Men and women may experience atypical heart attack symptoms. In contrast to the "classic" chest-splitting, gasping-for-breath symptoms, many heart attacks begin with symptoms that are so mild they are often mistaken for indigestion or muscle ache.

Diabetes affects more than 25 million Americans. New medications and strategies to treat the disease are greatly needed. But the jury is still out on the experimental medication dapagliflozin. The medication looks to have significant benefits and risks, according to a study published Monday. Dapagliflozin is being developed by Bristol-Myers-Squibb Co. in partnership with AstraZeneca. It represents a new class of diabetes medications called selective renal sodium glucose contransporter inhibitors.

If primary care doctors build intensive counseling programs to help their obese patients exercise, lose weight and get healthy, will they work? A new study finds that for half the population, at least, they will. For men and women alike, results will be modest. And for women, they won't last. The authors of the study, published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, concluded that physicians' efforts to improve their obese patients' health by promoting lifestyle change might do better to embrace "a more realistic expectation": a modest reduction of patients' waist circumference and the prevention of further weight gain.