Could a New Hormone End Your Daily Diabetes Injections?

One of the most difficult aspects of being a diabetic is the fact that sufferers often have to inject themselves with insulin on a daily basis in order to maintain their wellness and keep their sugar levels stable. Now, a new hormone has been discovered that could help to beat diabetes and restore wellness without sufferers having to resort to these daily injections.

Type 2 diabetes is a serious condition that affects sufferers on an ongoing basis. It occurs when people’s bodies are unable to produce enough insulin to keep their blood sugar stable and it can lead to all kinds of harmful side effects, including death.

Carried out at Harvard University, a new study has identified a hormone called betatrophin, which helps to promote the growth of the types of cells that secret insulin into the human blood stream. When trialled on mice, the scientists discovered that mice who were injected with the hormone produced  these insulin-secreting cells 30 times as fast as they normally did. As a result of this, scientists now believe that this same treatment could be used on humans, to trigger their bodies to make more of the cells the produce insulin and thus increase the levels of insulin in their body.

Type 2 diabetes affects almost 2.5 million people in Britain, meaning that this discovery has the potential to drastically improve millions of lives. If this treatment came to the market, diabetics would be able to forget about daily doses of insulin and instead just take this new betatrophin hormone on perhaps a weekly or maybe even monthly basis, and this alone would be enough to keep the insulin in their blood at an acceptable level.

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