According to a study from the University of Illinois at Chicago, if you have type 1 diabetes, and your wellness is at risk to, or suffering from, atherosclerosis, minimally invasive islet transplantation could help you to achieve insulin independence and reverse the progression of atherosclerosis in just a few years after the transplant.
The findings, which were published in the February issue of the journal Diabetes Care, have huge implications for the wellbeing of diabetics, especially women, as previous research has shown that female patients with the disease are particularly at risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, but intensive glycaemic control could prevent future cardiac events.
For this research, the team from UIC carried out longitudinal study, looking at how carotid intimae-media thickness, or CIMT changed over time in a group of type 1 diabetes patients without kidney disease or previous cardiovascular events. The patients received a total of 27 islet transplants (one to three transplants each) and were followed from one to five years after their first transplant. CIMT is a marker for atherosclerosis, and was measured before and approximately every 12 months after the first islet transplant.
According to said Kirstie Danielson, assistant professor in the UIC College of Medicine and School of Public Health, and lead author of the study, previous research has focused on metabolic changes and glycaemic control after transplant. ‘This is the first study to look at what happens to diabetes-related cardiovascular complications after islet cell transplantation alone without kidney transplant,’ she said.
The team discovered that CIMT decreased significantly even one year after islet transplant. Danielson said that between 12 and 50 months, the CIMT measures started to progress again, slightly more than they would in healthy individuals without diabetes, and at 50 months, after the transplants, the CIMT measures were still lower than pre-transplant levels.
Danielson attributes the improvements to better glycaemic control achieved through islet transplantation and better post-transplant management of cholesterol, or lipid levels. ‘The decline of CIMT we saw at one year is not generally seen in patients with diabetes,’ she said, and so as these results were so positive, the teams’ next step is to replicate these results in a larger trial.
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