BOSTON, May 30: Regular insulin shots do not delay or prevent childhood-onset diabetes, according to a new study in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine that appears to dash hopes that the hormone can keep children from developing the blood-sugar disease.
“In persons at high risk of diabetes, insulin at the dosage used in this study does not delay or prevent type 1 diabetes,” said Dr. Jay Skyler of the University of Miami, who led a team of researchers in the nine-year study.
Diabetes, a chronic illness characterized by raised blood sugar levels, is the fifth-deadliest disease in the United States and will claim more than 210,000 lives this year, according to the American Diabetes Association.
Type 1 diabetes, which makes up around 10 percent of all cases, usually develops between the ages of 10 and 14 and currently afflicts between 850,000 and 1.7 million Americans.
The study’s findings contradict research published in 1993 and 1998 that raised hopes the shots might prevent diabetes. In the aftermath of those studies, which involved small groups of people, some doctors began giving insulin as a preventive measure to patients at risk for the disease.
The Skyler team had trouble finding patients for its research because they, or their doctors, believed pilot studies had already established that the treatment was effective.
As it turns out, it is not.
The researchers identified 339 youngsters with an average age of 12 who had a 50-50 risk of developing diabetes over the next five years. Half were given twice-daily shots of 0.25 units of insulin for every kilogramme they weighed, plus annual infusions of insulin over a four-day period. The rest were put under close observation.
NO DEMONSTRATED BENEFIT: They found that 70 of the youngsters who were not treated developed diabetes, but so did 69 who received the shots.
The findings, Skyler said, not only show the therapy doesn’t work but also suggest doctors should not prescribe treatments only “on the basis of small pilot studies.”
However, Thursday’s Journal contains another pilot study that offers hope childhood-onset diabetes can be treated.
That research, a study conducted by Dr Kevan Herold of Columbia University, suggests a chemical designed to attack certain cells in the body may be able to slow the progress of type 1 diabetes if it is given early in the disease’s progress.
The researchers, who followed the patients for a year, found that after 14 days of treatment insulin production dropped in only three out of 12 volunteers compared to 10 out of 12 people who received no treatment.
“Thus, treatment within the first six weeks after the onset of type 1 diabetes mellitus ... appeared to arrest the deterioration of insulin production in the majority of our 12 patients for at least the first year of disease,” the team concluded.—Reuters