Vitamin D against diabetes
Large doses of vitamin D can cure diabetes, scientists say
Type 2 diabetes can be suppressed by using large doses of vitamin D and a substance that enhances the effectiveness of its work in pancreatic cells, scientists say in an article published in the journal Cell (Wei et al., Vitamin D Switches BAF Complexes to Protect β Cells).
"We know that inflammation plays a key role in the development of diabetes. Our study showed that vitamin D and cellular receptors reacting to its molecules were associated with both inflammation and how often pancreatic beta cells survive," said Ronald Evans from the Salk Institute in La Jolla (in a press release Boosting the effects of Vitamin D to tackle diabetes – VM).
According to WHO statistics, there are 347 million patients with diabetes mellitus in the world, and approximately every 9 out of 10 diabetics suffer from type 2 diabetes resulting from an increase in the body's immunity to insulin. 80% of diabetics live in low- and middle-income countries. By 2030, diabetes will become the seventh cause of death worldwide.
One of the main reasons for the development of type 2 diabetes, as recent experiments on mice show, is the "overgrowth" of the pancreas with fat and the development of inflammation that changes the work of beta cells that produce insulin and cause them to produce less hormone.
Such discoveries, as Evans notes, made his team think about how substances that suppress inflammation, such as vitamin D, will affect the viability of this part of the pancreas.
To answer this question, biologists grew a small colony of beta cells in a test tube and began to monitor which gene chains were included in them when they came into contact with vitamin D molecules.
These observations showed that vitamin D controls the work of two chains of genes associated with the response to inflammation and protecting the cell from damage – BRD7 and BRD9. These sections of DNA and related proteins, as explained by geneticists, work in the opposite way – BRD9 blocks the work of receptors that read vitamin D molecules, and BRD7 reacts to their signals and starts the process of repairing the cell.
This discovery made scientists wonder what would happen if BRD9 was blocked and vitamin D was allowed to act unhindered on BRD7. Guided by this idea, biologists treated a colony of pancreatic cells with a mixture of vitamin D and the substance iBRD9, discovered several years ago, and tracked how they would react to inflammation.
As it turned out, the addition of even small amounts of iBRD9 dramatically enhanced the effect of vitamin D, due to which beta cells more often came out of the "state of emergency", repaired themselves and died much less often.
Encouraged by similar results, the scientists tested the work of this mixture of substances on mice suffering from severe forms of diabetes. Already two weeks after the start of taking vitamin D and iBRD9, the blood glucose level of rodents decreased by almost two times compared to individuals from the control group, and remained low for more than two months.
Scientists hope that clinical trials of this drug will begin in the near future, in which doctors will check whether such diabetes treatment has dangerous side effects and whether this technique will work on humans.
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