This week I took a not too pleasant walk down memory lane. While working on the story about the upcoming annual juvenile diabetes walk, I was transported back 42 years to the top of the Civic Hospital in Ottawa where they had a rooftop garden for patients and family members to visit.
My sister, who was just eight-years-old, was extremely sick. I can see her vividly with her red curls pale skin and freckles in her hospital gown, attached to hoses coming from a bag of fluid on a pole. She had just been diagnosed with a disease that, until then, I had never heard of.
Fortunately, my mom and dad were never the type of parents who would keep anything from us as long as we were curious to know about it. I was always curious.
I can remember, clearly, grappling with all these new ideas.Doctors Banting and Best, the pancreas, islets of Langerhans, insulin.
Mostly, though, I was terrified I was going to lose my little sister.
Four decades on, she is a poster child for managing the disease and may well live to see the cure.
Diabetes research has come a long, long way and now it may be paying dividends in other ways.
I like to think one of my strengths as a reporter is that I over-research stories. Most of the stuff I discover in the process never makes it into the newspaper, which may lead some to think of it more of a weakness. Perhaps it is in terms of efficiency for any given project, but by the time I am done I have a great deal of background and confidence with the subject matter, which I believe serves me long-term.
I digress, but it served me well this week with subject matter for this column.
Frequently areas of scientific inquiry are serendipitous.
Diabetes researchers recently discovered diabetics may have a 70 to 80 per cent higher risk of developing Alzheimer鈥檚 disease.
It was also known that, in addition to regulating blood-sugar levels, insulin stimulates growth and repair of nerve cells.
Alzheimer鈥檚 research has shown an insulin-like protein called GLP-1 reduces the production of a toxic protein that forms the brain plaques believed to cause Alzheimer鈥檚. Unfortunately, GLP-1 breaks down too quickly in the human body to treat Alzheimer鈥檚.
Liraglutide, on the other hand, is a relatively new, cheap drug that is widely prescribed to Type 2 diabetes patients to stimulate insulin production and it mimics the effects of GLP-1.
So, scientists decided to test it on mice.
After two months of liraglutide treatment, early stage Alzheimer鈥檚 mice were performing as well as normal mice and much better than their non-treated counterparts. Examination of their brains showed decreased plaque and inflammation and an increase in new neurones (nerve cells).
Furthermore, in later stage Alzheimer鈥檚 mice, liraglutide treatment improved performance in memory tests and even improved spatial learning suggesting the drug may actual be capable of reversing the effects of Alzheimer鈥檚 not simply stemming its progression.
Those exciting results quickly led to approval of human trials. The 5 million British pound study is now taking place with 210 Alzheimer鈥檚 patients across the United Kingdom.
If the results are as promising in humans as they were in mice, liraglutide鈥檚 approval for the treatment of dementia could happen very quickly because the drug is already on the market as a diabetes treatment so market studies are unnecessary.
This is really fantastic news and it also demonstrates the wonderful thing about science. Knowledge builds on itself, not just in a linear fashion, but exponentially.
It gives me hope that the problems of humanity, hunger, disease, climate change, among others, which currently seem impossible, could be solved through the acceleration of human knowledge. One never knows what serendipitous discovery might lead to another.
Diabetes was first described in 250 BC as 鈥渢he melting down of flesh and limbs into urine.鈥� It took approximately 2,200 years of accumulative human knowledge and incremental advances in the treatment of the disease to get to a solution that is responsible for the fact I today have a sister.
It took less than 100 years to get from that treatment to a possible cure for Alzheimer鈥檚.
What wonders will we see over the next 10 year?
