LifeCare Chiropractic

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Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 Diabetes

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POWERFUL NEWS FOR CHILDHOOD DISEASE??

Having a small child myself, the idea of Type 1 diabetes striking in infancy is heartbreaking to me.  I am strongly in favor of research to help ameliorate this condition in children (including islet cell transplantation).  I am even more strongly in favor of increasing and implementing our preventative efforts.  We already know that dairy likely plays a strong role in onset of Type 1 DM, and this review looks at the role of Vit D in prevention.  Interestingly, these two are connected, and the findings that dairy increases and Vit D decreases risk is very consistent with what we know about how dairy affects conversion of Vit D to its active form, calcitriol.  This means that making sure a pregnant mother is replete in Vit D through nursing and giving infants and toddlers Vit D supplementation is pivotal in lowering the incidence of T1DM.

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Uncommon Supplement Knocks Out Type 1 Diabetes

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vitamin K and juvenile diabetes
ehrenberg-bilder/Dollar Photo Club

Of all the forms of diabetes, Type 1 in children is the hardest for me to swallow. This is because it does not come from something the child did.

And while there are many things that have been shown to increase the risk of Type 1 diabetes, the parents of these children are generally not aware of many of these risk factors.  Take dairy, for instance.  Society has trained us to think that dairy is a “health” food and should be given to children.  But the research suggests otherwise, finding some clear links between dairy intake and Type 1 diabetes.  How many parents would even think for a second that the “health” drink that everyone recommends (especially the commercials…) would increase his or her little one’s risk of developing a lifelong chronic disease?

Other things like vitamin D deficiency is on the list of things shown to contribute to juvenile diabetes risk.  Viral infections are also on the list, but these are not really as modifiable as the first two risk factors.

In case you’re not aware, juvenile diabetes is an autoimmune condition where your body attacks its own beta cells in the pancreas; the cells that produce insulin to help you handle sugar.  The problem is that once the immune system has its teeth into something, it’s hard to get it to forget about attacking whatever it happens to be attacking.  If your immune system didn’t work this way, you would never build up an immunity to infections you have had in the past and vaccinations would never work.

Because of this, stopping the immune system from recognizing the beta cells of the pancreas as an invader in the first place is the most important thing we could do to prevent juvenile diabetes in the first place.  However, once the barn door has been open, so to speak, the next best approach is to try to achieve balance in the immune system.  When you have balance, your immune system is less likely to attack things it is not supposed to attack.

Enter this particular study.  In it, researchers looked at the ability of vitamin K to help control the immune system that is responsible for attack the beta cells of the pancreas.

Vitamin K is one of the four fat-soluble vitamins and has traditional been thought of as being important for clotting.  But, just like vitamin D, time has demonstrated that vitamin K has many other functions besides blood clotting.  Other functions include bone formation and keeping your blood vessels from calcifying.  All admirable qualities.

There are two main forms of vitamin K,  vitamin K1 (aka phylloquinone, which is the prefferred supplement form) and vitamin K2 (menaquinone).  Green leafies are an excellent source of vitamin K1, as is the bacteria in your gut, unless the bacteria in your gut have been decimated by antibiotic use in the past decade.

Over the past few years, more research has been demonstrating that vitamin K, just like vitamin D, seems to be a major player in the development of autoimmunity and may play a role in bringing back balance to the immune system, which is incredibly important for anyone with an autoimmune disease (like juvenile diabetes).

With this in mind, you can see why researchers had an interest in seeing whether vitamin K could impact markers associated with Type 1 diabetes. They used a compound called streptozotocin (STZ) to damage the beta cells of the pancreas in rats and then gave them vitamin K1 to see if it could protect the rats from the damage.  Here’s what they found:

  • Vitamin K1 reduced oxidative stress, enhanced antioxidants, and inhibited aldose reductase in pancreas.
  • Vitamin K1 blocked the death of the beta cells, leading to improved insulin levels, normal blood glucose and normal A1c levels.
  • Just in case this wasn’t good enough news, vitamin K1 led to an increase in the pancreas islet area, suggesting the possibility of regeneration.
  • Further, vitamin K1 was able to shut down NF-κB activation (a KEY factor in producing inflammation) and iNOS expression in the beta cells.

While this is an animal study, it still seems like pretty darn good news for the type 1 diabetes crowd.  Vitamin K supplementation is safe and inexpensive.  With findings this strong (it wasn’t any one finding, but rather that vitamin K seemed to impact every process along the chain of autoimmune Type 1 diabetes) it makes sense to add vitamin K to your or your child’s regimen if juvenile diabetes plagues your life.

On this same regimen would be other supplements like vitamin D, fish oils and dietary avoidance of dairy as well as an otherwise anti-diabetic lifestyle.

 

 

Bacterium Linked to Crohn’s Disease to Be Removed From Milk in UK – (11-02-00)

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Bacterium Linked to Crohn’s Disease to Be Removed From Milk in UK

My gosh…how much more evidence do we need???? Cow’s milk is NOT good for us. Loaded with hormones and antibiotics, a very common allergen, may actually contribute to fractures instead of protect, linked to Type I diabetes in children, and now this? When are we going to wake up??

(article) British health experts are to look at ways to eliminate a bacterium in milk that has been linked to Crohn’s disease from entering the human food chain, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said o Monday. As reported by Reuters Health, some scientists have warned that Mycobacterium paratuberculosis is widespread in the environment, survives pasteurisation, and is likely to be implicated in causing the bowel disorder. In a news release last week, the FSA confirmed that the bacterium can survive normal and even prolonged pasteurisation. Preliminary survey results had found it to be present in 1.9% of raw milk samples and 2.1% of pasteurised milk samples in the UK. The agency said independent experts on the Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Food had now examined the evidence that M. paratuberculosis might trigger Crohn’s disease. Although there was no proof, they were concerned that there might be a link.

Critical Supplement for ALL Type 1 Diabetics

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Type 1 diabetes, as opposed to the more common type 2 diabetes, usually strikes children, leading to a lifetime of carb counting and insulin pumps.

As the father of a now-8-year-old son, I could not imagine him living life attached to an insulin pump.  Type 1 diabetes can also strike adults, but more often than not, it is because he or she has poorly managed his or her Type 2 diabetes for long enough to kill off the beta cells of the pancreas.  But for the kids, it’s a different story.  The onset of this lifelong condition is not because of choices they have made, but because the immune system has decided to attack inward, destroying the very cells of the pancreas that produce the critically important insulin.

Over the years, scientists and researchers have begun to understand more and more about what contributes to the misdirection of the immune system.  I have covered many of these in previous blog articles that can be read by clicking here, but here’s a quick synopsis:

  • Dairy may be a culprit, despite the rose-colored glasses that public health gurus seem to view dairy products through.
  • Probiotics can help stave off type 1 diabetes (or antibiotics may contribute to diabetes, depending upon how you look at it).
  • Celiac disease / gluten sensitivity.
  • Vitamin D deficiency.

This particular article focuses on the vitamin D deficiency aspect.  Specifically, researchers looked at a small group of type 1 diabetic children who were deficient in vitamin D levels (<20 ng/ml) and were given enough vitamin D to keep levels above 50 ng/ml for up to one year (50 ng/ml, by the way, is a respectable level and far above the “sufficient” level of 20 ng/ml).

After getting blood levels of vitamin D up high enough, the researchers looked at what effect this had on immune system attacks against the pancreas (as measured by peripheral blood mononuclear cell reactivity against beta-cell autoantigens like glutamic acid decarboxylase 65-kD isoform, proinsulin and tyrosine phosphatase-like protein IA-2) as well as C-peptide levels (C-peptide is an indirect marker of how much insulin the pancreas is producing).

Here’s what they found:

  1. Vitamin D levels were safely reached and maintained.
  2. Immune system attacks against the pancreas dropped after vitamin D supplementation.
  3. C-peptide values remained stable after one year of treatment, meaning that the pancreas was still doing its job of producing insulin.

Talk about a simple intervention that can have a lifelong impact.  While this may seem surprising to some, one of the consistent effects of vitamin D is on introducing or maintaining balance in the immune system.  This is why it seems to play such a huge role in the onset of multiple sclerosis as well.

The importance of the GI tract – (05-05-03)

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Increased intestinal permeability as a cause of fluctuating postprandial blood glucose levels in Type 1 diabetic patients.

This article really reminds us of (or should wake others up to…) the importance of the GI tract to every other system and every other disease. Increased intestinal permeability will allow larger molecules to enter into the body and increase the antigenic load that the immune system and liver have to deal with. Restoring permeability can be done with careful attention to diet, avoidance of common allergens, probiotics and soluble fiber intake. I’m sure the info in this article will also pertain to Type 2 diabetics as well.

Click here for more information.

Doctor, Why Is My Vitamin D Level Low?

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This is actually a very pertinent question and one I have asked many times.  Why are some many patient’s vitamin D levels very low despite good sun exposure.  I may have the answer.

When researchers first discovered that levels of vitamin D deficiency were darn near ubiquitous in our population, the initial thoughts ranged from particulate matter in the air blocking UVB light penetration to heavy use of sunscreen.

None of the ideas seemed to fit completely.  Sure, the average person lathers up with SPF 300 to walk to the car, but what about my patient who swam outside on a high school swimming team and still had a vitamin D level of 17 (optimal range 60-100) at the END of season here in Arizona?

Then I came across this particular study.  While it is a rat study, the concepts put forth could answer the question for at least half of the population.

The diabetic spectrum.

Yup.  Makes sense given that upwards of 50% of the population are on this trajectory, and the numbers are likely much higher.

Here’s how it works:

  • The diabetic spectrum, even in its early stages, is very damaging to the kidneys.
  • Studies have shown that, in Type 2 diabetic rats, there is a significant loss of vitamin D and vitamin D binding protein (a protein in the blood that holds vitamin D while it floats through the bloodstream) in the urine due to kidney damage.
  • This study confirms that the same problems exist in Type 1 diabetes as well.

Makes for some very interesting fodder, wouldn’t you say?  And, if this holds true in humans (and I can’t see any reason to believe that it wouldn’t) certainly goes a very long way towards explaining why so much of the population has low vitamin D levels.

It also helps to explain why so many patients have a hard time boosting their vitamin D levels despite high levels of supplementation.

Here’s some further musings…

Some have suggested that low vitamin D levels are not the problem, but rather, the body lowers the level of vitamin D in response to a disease state such as cancer.  Because of this, for someone with chronic disease, they should do everything possible to almost eradicate vitamin D in their blood.  I firmly disagree with this hypothesis and treatment approach, even having one patient who went through the protocol and got VERY ill from it.

But what if low vitamin D is just yet another marker of physiology gone haywire as our bodies move towards diabetes?

It would not be the first time that we have looked at a single marker (like cholesterol) and thought that low levels, by themselves, were important, rather than looking at the big picture.

This also means that all the doctors out there diligently checking vitamin D and recommending supplementation but not addressing other aspects of lifestyle (like living an anti-diabetic lifestyle) are, once again, missing the boat entirely.

An additional interesting note to this study. The researchers also looked at whether the addition of resistant starch (think fiber—or you can read a previous blog article on the topic by clicking here) could affect the loss of vitamin D through the kidneys.

Wonderfully, the resistant starch virtually eliminated all the vitamin D lost through the kidneys.  Given that the resistant starch in a higher fiber diet would go a long way towards avoiding or managing diabetes, it meshes nicely with the findings in this study.  Higher fiber, more anti-diabetic diet = higher vitamin D levels.  Not a bad outcome, regardless of how you look at it.

So, from now on, I know that, in those patients whose vitamin D levels just won’t budge despite strong supplementation, increasing the fiber in the diet and an overall anti-diabetic diet (my personal recommendations can be found in my free eBook by clicking here) will be strongly recommended.

TNF in type 1 diabetics and glucose control and cardiovascular risk – (08-21-00)

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TNF in type 1 diabetics and glucose control and cardiovascular risk

This study points to TNF-alpha as a contributor to the damage done to the pancreas in Type I diabetes. Recall that TNF inhibitors are the new rheumatoid arthritis and now Crohn’s disease drugs. As research gets more and more specific, I truly believe that we will come to find really only a few abnormalities causing most of man’s chronic diseases. TNF-alpha is a perfect example.

Journal of Internal Medicine 248 (1), 67-76 The cytokine TNF-a reveals a complex relationship with diabetes. It is involved in beta-cell damage leading to type 1 diabetes, causes insulin resistance associated with obesity and is of influence in the formation of atherosclerotic vascular lesions. We were interested in the possible association of this cytokine with metabolic control and cardiovascular risk factors in patients with type 1 diabetes. Our data indicate that TNF-a plasma levels are increased in type 1 diabetes mellitus and reveal a significant association with metabolic long-term control parameters, HbA1c and fructosamine for glycaemic control, and HDL cholesterol for triglyceride metabolism, as well with lipid peroxidation.