Tag Archives: diabetes

Diabetes drug kept breast tumors away in mice

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Diabetes drug kept breast tumors away in mice

Adding the common diabetes drug metformin to chemotherapy helped shrink breast cancer tumors faster in mice and keep them away longer than chemotherapy alone, raising hope for a more effective way to treat cancer, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said metformin appeared to target breast cancer stem cells — a kind of master cancer cell that resists conventional treatment and may be the source of many tumors that grow back.

“What’s exciting here is we now have something that is mechanistically a different kind of killer of cancer that can synergize with chemotherapy,” Kevin Struhl of Harvard Medical School, whose study appears in the journal Cancer Research, said in a telephone briefing.

Many teams have been looking for ways to destroy the master cancer cells in the hope of making cancer easier to cure.

Last month, a team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that a chemical called salinomycin could kill breast cancer stem cells.

What is different with his study, Struhl said, is that metformin is a widely used drug with a long safety track record. “There are tens of millions of people who take this drug,” he said.

“Although our studies are limited to mice and cells, metformin has a history of anti-cancer effects,” he said.

Metformin has already been shown to reduce the risk of some cancers, including pancreatic and breast cancer, in large studies of people with diabetes.

Struhl said metformin’s affect on cancer stem cells appeared to be separate from its ability to help the body use insulin and lower blood sugar — which also can improve breast cancer survival.

His team studied metformin and the cancer drug doxorubicin in lab dishes and found they killed both human cancer stem cells and non-stem cancer cells.

Mice that had tumors and got metformin and chemotherapy were less likely to have tumors grow back two months after treatment compared with mice that got chemotherapy alone.

“When we had both drugs together, we lost the tumors faster, but more importantly, there was no relapse,” Struhl said.

He said with metformin, it may be possible to reduce the chemotherapy dose and still get the same benefit.

That will need to be studied in people and a study is getting under way. Dr. Jennifer Ligibel, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard, is organizing a large trial with colleagues in Canada to study metformin in women with early stage breast cancer.

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Only 10 percent of U.S. adults have low heart risk

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Only 10 percent of U.S. adults have low heart risk

Ninety percent of American adults have at least one risk factor for heart disease, researchers reported on Monday.

Virtually all Americans either have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, are overweight, smoke or exercise too little, the team led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

“Unfortunately, the limited strides that were made toward this goal during the 1970s and 1980s were eroded by the increases in excess weight, diabetes and hypertension during more recent decades,” the CDC’s Dr. Earl Ford, who led the study, said in a statement.

Ford’s team looked at four national studies covering tens of thousands of Americans aged 25 to 74.

Only 10 percent had low risk scores in all five categories, they reported in the journal Circulation.

“Until the early 90s, we were moving in a positive direction, but then it took a turn and we’re headed in a negative direction,” said Ford.

“When you look at the individual factors, tobacco use is still headed in the right direction and so are cholesterol levels, although that has leveled off. The problem is that blood pressure, BMI (body mass index, a measure of obesity) and diabetes are all headed in the wrong direction.”

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States and many other countries.

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Most diabetics falling short on healthy eating

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Most diabetics falling short on healthy eating

Diabetes mellitus is a disease characterized by persistent hyperglycemia (high blood sugar levels), resulting either from inadequate secretion of the hormone insulin, an inadequate response of target cells to insulin, or a combination of these factors. Diabetes is a metabolic disease requiring medical diagnosis, treatment and lifestyle changes.

There are many causes and forms of diabetes known. The three most common patterns of diabetes have been recognized over the last thirty years as type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes (or type 3)[1], although these three “types” of diabetes are more accurately considered patterns of pancreatic failure rather than single diseases. Each type can be produced by a variety of identifiable or yet-to-be-identified causes. There are some patients whose diabetes cannot be easily fit into one of these types, and some who display characteristics of more than one type at the same time.

Most Americans with diabetes are eating too much fat and sodium, and not enough fruits, vegetables, grains and low-fat dairy, a new study suggests.

The results, say researchers, indicate that many people with diabetes may need more education about the importance of nutrition in managing their condition.

Excess weight is one of the major risk factors for type 2 diabetes, a disorder in which the body can no longer properly use the blood sugar-regulating hormone insulin. Diet, exercise and weight loss are key to managing the disorder, and in some cases, weight loss can reverse the condition.

Yet in the new study, researchers found that of nearly 2,800 middle- aged and older U.S. adults with type 2 diabetes, nearly all were exceeding the daily recommended fat intake. When it came to artery-clogging saturated fat, 85 percent were consuming too much.

Similarly, 92 percent of study participants were consuming too much sodium, which can raise blood pressure and contribute to diabetics’ already elevated risks of heart disease and kidney disease. (See related Reuters Health story today.)

The researchers used a number of nutritional yardsticks, including the Food Guide Pyramid and recommendations by the Institute of Medicine. For example, experts recommend that adults get no more than 20 percent to 35 percent of their daily calories from fat, with less than 10 percent coming from saturated fat.

And if most study participants were getting too much of those nutrients, many were also not getting enough of certain healthy foods, the researchers report in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

Less than half were getting the minimum recommended servings of fruits, vegetables, dairy and grains each day.

“I thought we were going to find people who, because they have a chronic disease, were more educated about and more motivated than the average American to eat healthy, but that’s not the case,” lead researcher Dr. Mara C. Vitolins, of Wake-Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said in a written statement.

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