Potentially wonderful news for type 2 diabetics
This could be really really big:
By destroying the mucous membrane in the small intestine and causing a new one to develop, scientists stabilised the blood sugar levels of people with type 2 diabetes. The results have been described as “spectacular” – albeit unexpected – by the chief researchers involved.
In the hourlong procedure, trialled on 50 patients in Amsterdam, a tube with a small balloon in its end is inserted through the mouth of the patient down to the small intestine.
The balloon is inflated with hot water and the mucous membrane burned away by the heat. Within two weeks a new membrane develops, leading to an improvement in the patient’s health.
Even a year after the treatment, the disease was found to be stable in 90% of those treated. It is believed there is a link between nutrient absorption by the mucus membrane in the small intestine and the development of insulin resistance among people with type 2 diabetes.
The article doesn’t mention it, but I would guess that the mechanism by which this works is at least somewhat similar to what happens with a lot of gastric bypass patients who have type 2 diabetes. In the case of those patients, the operation acts as a near-instantaneous cure, and works long before they lose any weight.
Fascinating.
I know you don’t or won’t do low-carb, Neo, so I don’t want to re-open that debate per se. Many Type II diabetics and pre-diabetics (I was pre-diabetic) can completely reverse their conditions and eliminate all diabetes medications on a low carbohydrate diet that also contains lots of natural fats and oils. People who can get rid of Type II diabetes with diet should probably do so, but there are always people with more complex situations who might really benefit from this procedure.
It’s amazing to read current research on how many things are related to what’s in our gut which we’d never thought would be connected.
Neo
Need the name of company.
Cornhead:
The link says that it is being done by Dutch researchers: “Jacques Bergman, a professor of gastroenterology at Amsterdam UMC” made the announcement. I don’t think it’s available anywhere else, but hopefully it will be ASAP if it continues to show good results.
People still have to take medication, apparently, but their diabetes is under much better and easier control.
Usually a drug company sponsors research. Or the doc will license his invention to a drug company.
Cornhead:
I don’t know why a drug company would be sponsoring research that relies on a surgical procedure rather than drugs. Perhaps it’s funded by the government (some equivalent of the NIH) or some foundation or other.
Very amazing. Years ago I heard a story from a guy who suffered chronic ulcers, that doctors had discovered some kind of stomach infection to be causing many of them. No one thought that bacteria could survive there.
I wonder if this new discovery is connected to the type of microbiome that we all have living in our intestines. It’s nifty that they can use something a benign as hot water to get the job done.
I wonder how hot the gastric lining has to get for the beneficial effect. Could I just drink a lot of hot water, koffie, of tee?
Is it the mucus membrane, or rather a secondary effect on the microbiome? I would have to imagine that anything hot enough to destroy the membrane could also wipe out various bacteria.
This would be more in line with the reported effect of fecal transplants. Also the impact of low carb, which may have far less to do with the food itself, but rather the impact on the microbiome.
One potential explanation is that one is removing gut microbes that live near the wall of the intestine. While one thinks of the “gut microbiome” as being the colon, there are some bacteria that live in the small intestine as well, and those generally live in/near the ‘crypts’ of the folds of the small intestine. Perhaps what we’re doing is removing them or changing their micro-environment; that then changes some changes in signaling, etc.
Regarding Kate’s comment, I was an undiagnosed diabetic for at least 7 years (because that’s the time from the first blood work that showed blood sugar over 140 until my doctor did their damn job and actually paid attention to more than my cholesterol). By the time I was diagnosed, I had a fasting glucose of around 430, and my a1c was 11.7. Early attempts to cut carbs, which ended up replacing them with protein because I still believed the “eating fat is bad” mantra, didn’t fix my blood sugar. But resources like this video, and a lot of the posts on https://market-ticker.org/, helped me tie the pieces together and eventually get off meds. I still haven’t gotten below 6.1 a1c, but I’m there without meds.
But if this works as well as this article suggests, I’d enjoy that with mostly LCHF a lot more than having to be strict LCHF. I miss being able to have a piece of pie every blue moon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da1vvigy5tQ
We are still poorly understand interrelation of our microbiomes with organism as a whole, but it becomes increasingly obvious that particular associations of bacteria that cover all our mucus membranes as continuous films are quite resilient and capable to reestablish themselves after many therapeutic procedures, both in norm and in pathology. This explains a poor efficiency of probiotic therapies and of use of antibiotics. But dietary change can shift the composition of these associations significantly, and this may be the main mechanism of efficiency of such changes. Some associations thrive on the meat diet, others on a vegetable one; some need carbohydrates, other prefer fats. The outcomes are strictly individual and depend on specific type of microbiome of a patient, usually unknown and even lacking any scientific description so far.
I wonder if fasting does something similar to the small intestine
Brian, I started following the diet recommendations at DietDoctor.com last February. By late June my a1c was down from 6.1 to 5.8; it should be a little lower, but I’ll take it. My opinion is that you can have a piece of pie if it’s only once in a blue moon. If you start doing that regularly, the trouble will return. Cheesecake causes less damage, I find. I am probably mostly “low carb” rather than “keto.”
Sergey, yes, it does seem that different bodies need different approaches. We forget that one prescription does not fit all.
Had severe stomach acid for years…dentist prescribed doxicillin for two weeks after a procedure…problem disappeared for a decade….bad bacteria in the gut…
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Do you have a link to the original report, please?
I skimmed this paper a few days ago. It’s definitely related, but it’s very technical.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830370/
Low carb costs nothing and works 100% of the time in any Type Two person who adheres to it.
No risking small bowel perforation either.
Ya got the diabetes? Quit eating sugar, or things the body turns in to sugar.
It’s so not complicated.
But it is all about what you are doing.
lee, you are an idiot….what works for YOU does not work for EVERYONE…..
low carb does NOT work 100% of the time…….it DOES NOT…….
just because it works for you, does not mean it works for EVERY ONE 100% of the time…