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The Diabetes Threat
The number of Americans diagnosed with type 2 diabetes rose from 1.5 million in 1958 to 18.8 million in 2010. That’s an increase of epidemic proportions. Even more disturbing, another 7 million...
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Brown Fat, White Fat, Good Fat, Bad Fat
Caption: Brown fat cells (stained brown with antibodies against the brown fat-specific protein Ucp1) nestled in amongst white fat cells.Credit: Patrick Seale, University of Pennsylvania School of...
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New Take On How Gastric Bypass Cures Diabetes
Caption: This is a PET/CT scan of a rat before (left) and after (right) gastric bypass surgery. This kind of a PET scan shows that after surgery the intestine (the looping structures) are using more...
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Fighting Obesity: New Hopes From Brown Fat
Caption: Brown fat—actually marked in green on this image—is wrapped around the neck and shoulders. This “shawl” of brown fat warms blood before it travels to the brain.Illustration: John MacNeill,...
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MicroRNA Research Takes Aim at Cholesterol
Caption: Illustration of artery partially blocked by a cholesterol plaque. If you’re concerned about your cardiovascular health, you’re probably familiar with “good” and “bad” cholesterol: high-density...
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Metabolomics: Taking Aim at Diabetic Kidney Failure
iStockCaption: Dialysis is often used to treat kidney failure related to diabetes. My own research laboratory has worked on the genetics of diabetes for two decades. One of my colleagues from those...
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Bionic Pancreas for Type 1 Diabetes
Caption: Boston University researcher Ed Damiano with his son David, who has type 1 diabetes, in 2002.Credit: Toby Milgrome From taking selfies to playing Candy Crush, smart phones are being put to a...
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Blood Sugar Control for Diabetes: Asking the Heart Questions
Credit: Thinkstock When most people think about risk factors for cardiovascular disease, they likely think of blood pressure readings or cholesterol levels. But here’s something else that should be...
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Creative Minds: Lessons from Halfway Around the Globe
Caption: Duncan Maru (right) and Community Health Director Ashma Baruwal (left) evaluating a patient in rural Nepal.Credit: Allison Shelley A decade ago, as a medical student doing volunteer work at a...
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Big Data Study Reveals Possible Subtypes of Type 2 Diabetes
Caption: Computational model showing study participants with type 2 diabetes grouped into three subtypes, based on similarities in data contained in their electronic health records. Such information...
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Pursuing Precision Medicine for Chronic Kidney Disease
Caption: Scanning electron micrograph showing a part of one of the kidney’s glomerular filters, which are damaged in people with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The cells with the lacy cytoplasmic...
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Obesity Research: Study Shows Significant Benefits of Modest Weight Loss
For the one in three American adults who are obese, recommendations to lose substantial amounts of weight through a combination of diet and exercise can seem daunting and, at times, hopeless. But a new...
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Progress Toward Stem Cell Treatment for Diabetes
Caption: Insulin-containing pancreatic beta cells (green) derived from human stem cells. The red cells are producing another metabolic hormone, glucagon, that regulates blood glucose levels. Blue...
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Precision Medicine: Using Genomic Data to Predict Drug Side Effects and Benefits
People with type 2 diabetes are at increased risk for heart attacks, stroke, and other forms of cardiovascular disease, and at an earlier age than other people. Several years ago, the Food and Drug...
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International “Big Data” Study Offers Fresh Insights into T2D
Caption: This international “Big Data” study involved hundreds of researchers in 22 countries (red). It’s estimated that about 10 percent of the world’s population either has type 2 diabetes (T2D) or...
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Creative Minds: Do Celebrity Endorsements Influence Teens’ Health?
Marie Bragg Marie Bragg is a first-generation American, raised by a mother who immigrated to Florida from Trinidad. She watched her uncle in Florida cope effectively with type 2 diabetes, taking...
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Muscle Enzyme Explains Weight Gain in Middle Age
Thinkstock/tetmc The struggle to maintain a healthy weight is a lifelong challenge for many of us. In fact, the average American packs on an extra 30 pounds from early adulthood to age 50. What’s...
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Protein Links Gut Microbes, Biological Clocks, and Weight Gain
Caption: Lipids (red) inside mouse intestinal cells with and without NFIL3.Credit: Lora V. Hooper, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas The American epidemic of obesity is a major...
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Creative Minds: Potential Diabetes Lessons from Binge-Eating Snakes
Stephen Secor/Credit: Secor Lab Many people would do just about anything to avoid an encounter with a snake. Not Stephen Secor. Growing up in central New York State, Secor was drawn to them. He’d spend...
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Cool Videos: Insulin from Bacteria to You
If you have a smartphone, you’ve probably used it to record a video or two. But could you use it to produce a video that explains a complex scientific topic in 2 minutes or less? That was the...
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Can Artificial Cells Take Over for Lost Insulin-Secreting Cells?
Caption: Artificial beta cell, made of a lipid bubble (purple) carrying smaller, insulin-filled vesicles (green). Imaged with cryo-scanning electron microscope (cryo-SEM) and colorized.Credit: Zhen Gu...
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Creative Minds: Designing Personalized Clinical Trials
Karina Davidson/Jörg Meyer It might have been 25 years ago, but Karina Davidson remembers that day like yesterday. She was an intern in clinical psychology, and two concerned parents walked into the...
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Does Gastric Bypass Reduce Cardiovascular Complications of Diabetes?
Thinkstock/IPGGutenbergUKLtd For obese people with diabetes, doctors have increasingly been offering gastric bypass surgery as a way to lose weight and control blood glucose levels. Short-term results...
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Building a Smarter Bandage
Credit: Tufts University, Medford, MA Smartphones, smartwatches, and smart electrocardiograms. How about a smart bandage? This image features a prototype of a smart bandage equipped with temperature...
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The Actin Superhighway
Credit: Andrew Lombardo and David Warshaw, University of Vermont, Burlington What looks like a traffic grid filled with roundabouts is nothing of the sort: It’s actually a peek inside a tiny...
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Oral Insulin Delivery: Can the Tortoise Win the Race?
Caption: The African leopard tortoise’s shape inspired a new insulin-injecting “pill” (right). Credit: Alex Abramson People with diabetes often must inject insulin multiple times a day to keep their...
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Fundamental Knowledge of Microbes Shedding New Light on Human Health
Caption: Human microbiome research requires teamwork. Kimberly Jefferson (second from left), a leader of the Multi-Omic Microbiome Study—Pregnancy Initiative, joins some of the team at Virginia...
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Study in Africa Yields New Diabetes Gene
Caption: Volunteering my medical services in Nigeria three decades ago inspired me to learn more about type 2 diabetes in Africa and beyond. Credit: Margaret Collins When I volunteered to serve as a...
View ArticleGiving Thanks for Biomedical Research
This Thanksgiving, Americans have an abundance of reasons to be grateful—loving family and good food often come to mind. Here’s one more to add to the list: exciting progress in biomedical research....
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Insulin-Producing Organoids Offer Hope for Treating Type 1 Diabetes
Caption: Human islet-like organoids express insulin (green). Credit: Salk Institute For the 1 to 3 million Americans with type 1 diabetes, the immune system destroys insulin-producing beta cells of...
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How COVID-19 Can Lead to Diabetes
Along with the pneumonia, blood clots, and other serious health concerns caused by SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, some studies have also identified another troubling connection. Some people can...
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Artificial Intelligence Getting Smarter! Innovations from the Vision Field
One of many health risks premature infants face is retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), a leading cause of childhood blindness worldwide. ROP causes abnormal blood vessel growth in the light-sensing eye...
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Unlocking Potential in The Next Generation of Scientists
Caption: The Pacific STEP-UP team visits Guam for opening of NIDDK lab (l-r): George Hui, University of Hawaii at Manoa; NIDDK’s Griffin P. Rodgers and Lawrence Agodoa; Aneesa Golshan, University of...
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Artificial Pancreas Improves Blood Glucose Control in Young Kids with Type 1...
Credit: Shutterstock/sirtravelalot; Tandem Diabetes Care, San Diego, CA Last week brought some great news for parents of small children with type 1 diabetes (T1D). It involved what’s called an...
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Science, Serendipity, and Art
Credit: Bryan Bogin and Matthew Steinsaltz, Zachary Levine Lab, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT Fractals are complex geometric patterns repeated at progressively smaller scales....
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Uncovering Disease-Driving Events that Lead to Type 2 Diabetes
Researchers found lower levels of the protein RFX6 led to beta cells in the pancreas releasing less insulin. Lower RFX6 levels also led to structural changes in the DNA, specifically in sites that...
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A New Target to Improve the Health and Lives of Childhood Cancer Survivors:...
Researchers found that prediabetes and diabetes are highly prevalent in survivors of childhood cancer. Credit Donny Bliss/NIH. Modified from SB Dixon, et al. Before joining NIH, I conducted research...
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