Insulin

When roasted at 475 degrees, coffee beans are sometimes described as rich and full-bodied. But for the full-bodied person who is not so rich, unroasted coffee beans - green as the day they were picked - may hold the key to cheap and effective weight loss, new research suggests. In a study presented Tuesday at the American Chemical Society's spring national meeting in San Diego, 16 overweight young adults took, by turns, a low dose of green coffee bean extract, a high dose of the supplement, and a placebo.

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.

Until recently, very few people had ever heard of raspberry ketones, the aromatic compounds that give the berries their distinctive smell. Today, health food stores have trouble keeping the capsules or drops of the stuff on their shelves. Almost overnight, an obscure plant compound became the next big thing in weight loss - and all it took was a few words from Dr. Oz. In a February episode of "The Dr. Oz Show," Mehmet Oz told viewers that raspberry ketones were "the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. " Once Oz calls something a "miracle," it doesn't remain obscure for long.

Even as Republican presidential candidates vow to dismantle what they call "Obamacare" -- the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 -- some of the law's key provisions are making their way onto the medical landscape. The latest step toward implementing the law came Thursday, as the Food and Drug Administration issued draft rules that will open the U.S. marketplace to "biosimilars" -- essentially generic versions of medications made with living, often bioengineered, organisms.

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.

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.

Pfizer Inc. said it would finance a three-year, $14-million project with four universities and Entelos Inc. to study how insulin affects diabetes and obesity. New York-based Pfizer said its academic partners were Caltech, UC Santa Barbara, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts. Entelos, based in Foster City, Calif., uses computer modeling to test the likely effects of new drugs.

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)

Anabolic steroids have long been chemicals of choice for bodybuilders wanting to bulk up. But the substances can cause men's breasts to grow, their hair to fall out and their testicles to shrink. The steroids also show up in blood tests. Insulin, however, does none of these things, which makes it especially appealing for bodybuilders who want help achieving a desired look.

Jamie Powers has Type 2 diabetes. He weighs about 370 pounds and is in a wheelchair because complications from his disease required that his left leg be amputated below the knee. He takes daily pills and insulin shots. I met Powers, 55, earlier this week at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, where he was among about 200 people attending a seminar titled "Diabetes Breakthrough. " A newspaper ad promised that "you will discover the hidden secrets about how to reverse your diabetes, reduce and eliminate your need and dependence on drugs, lose weight without exercise, explode your energy levels and the potential to become non-diabetic.

An intermittent low-carb diet could be better than a standard low-calorie Mediterranean diet for weight loss and lowering insulin, a study finds. Low-carb diets have been shown in a number of studies to be superior to regular low-calorie diets for various weight health outcomes, but they're notoriously difficult to stick to for a number of people. In this study, researchers followed 115 women who had a family history of breast cancer for four months as they were randomly assigned to one of three diet programs.

On Thursday the Food and Drug Administration issued draft guidelines for researchers and manufacturers working to develop and build an artificial pancreas to help patients with Type 1 diabetes control their blood sugar. About 3 million Americans have Type 1 diabetes, which develops when cells in the pancreas stop producing enough insulin to control blood sugar.  Patients with the disease must monitor their blood glucose aggressively.  If it goes too high, they have to carefully calculate how much insulin they need to bring it in line -- and then get an injection.  If a person with Type 1 diabetes' blood sugar drops too low, he or she could require a dose of another hormone, glucagon, to raise it back up. The unrelenting and error-prone process can be exhausting, so patient advocacy groups such as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation have been pushing the development of an artificial pancreas that would tightly control blood sugar levels much as the actual organ: monitoring glucose levels continually and automatically delivering the right dose of insulin, through a pump, into the body.  The system would work by connecting the monitoring system to a computer, which in turn would calculate the correct insulin dose and send a signal to the insulin pump to deliver the needed hormones.

Dan Belisario, 47, first met Gary Scheiner more than 10 years ago. Belisario had just been given an insulin pump for his Type 1 diabetes, and he worked with Scheiner, a diabetes coach, to incorporate the new device into his life. After he became comfortable with the pump, his visits with Scheiner tapered off; he'd skip a few months, or even a year. But that changed last September, when Belisario, a sales manager from New Jersey, met with an ophthalmologist. "There's a vessel in the back of my eye that's swollen," he says; it's a complication of diabetes that results from continued high blood sugar.

Inhaling a concentrated cloud of insulin through the nose twice a day appears to slow — and in some cases reverse — symptoms of memory loss in people with early signs of Alzheimer's disease, a new pilot study has found. The study involved only 104 people and is considered very preliminary. But it suggests that a safe, simple and cheap measure that boosts flagging metabolism in key areas of the brain could hold off or possibly derail the progression of the devastating neurological disorder in its early stages.

The birth in Texas of 16-pound, 1-ounce JaMichael Brown, possibly the largest newborn the Lone Star state has ever seen, raises a few questions. For one, how can babies get so big? According to reports, JaMichael’s size may stem in part from his 39-year-old mother’s gestational diabetes, the type diagnosed during pregnancy. Such mothers tend to have larger babies. Here’s why, from an explainer by the American Diabetes Assn. : “When you have gestational diabetes, your pancreas works overtime to produce insulin, but the insulin does not lower your blood glucose levels.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke out this week about her Type 1 diabetes, calling attention to the issue—a condition that as many as 3 million Americans know well. The pinpricks for blood, the glucose monitors, the insulin injections… Daily life isn’t easy, the Supreme Court justice told a gathering of children with diabetes. An online diabetic community would seem to agree. This from the blog Cure Moll : “When I was 10, my mom and I were used to shots, we knew the perfect amount of insulin for everything, from a small piece of pizza and cake at a birthday party to simply cereal for breakfast.

Dan Belisario, 47, first met Gary Scheiner more than 10 years ago. Belisario had just been given an insulin pump for his Type 1 diabetes, and he worked with Scheiner, a diabetes coach, to incorporate the new device into his life. After he became comfortable with the pump, his visits with Scheiner tapered off; he'd skip a few months, or even a year. But that changed last September, when Belisario, a sales manager from New Jersey, met with an ophthalmologist. "There's a vessel in the back of my eye that's swollen," he says; it's a complication of diabetes that results from continued high blood sugar.

Inhaling a concentrated cloud of insulin through the nose twice a day appears to slow — and in some cases reverse — symptoms of memory loss in people with early signs of Alzheimer's disease, a new pilot study has found. The study involved only 104 people and is considered very preliminary. But it suggests that a safe, simple and cheap measure that boosts flagging metabolism in key areas of the brain could hold off or possibly derail the progression of the devastating neurological disorder in its early stages.

Jamie Powers has Type 2 diabetes. He weighs about 370 pounds and is in a wheelchair because complications from his disease required that his left leg be amputated below the knee. He takes daily pills and insulin shots. I met Powers, 55, earlier this week at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, where he was among about 200 people attending a seminar titled "Diabetes Breakthrough. " A newspaper ad promised that "you will discover the hidden secrets about how to reverse your diabetes, reduce and eliminate your need and dependence on drugs, lose weight without exercise, explode your energy levels and the potential to become non-diabetic.

Physicist Rosalyn S. Yalow, who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of a medical diagnostic test that revolutionized patient care and led to a new understanding of diabetes and a host of other diseases, died May 30 in the Bronx, N.Y. She was 89. No cause of death was announced. Although her work in medical diagnostics was seminal, she was perhaps equally well known for her temerity in entering a field that had previously been dominated by men and for her persistence in pursuing her goals in the face of opposition from the establishment and the opposite sex. She was only the second woman to win the Nobel in medicine and only the sixth to win a Nobel in any science.