Long-term decline in cognitive function is a common consequence for patients who frequently experience low blood sugar levels when using insulin to manage their diabetes.
The findings showed that stimulating antioxidant defences in mice reduced cognitive impairments, which could help improve the quality of life for diabetic patients.
"Low blood sugar is an almost unavoidable consequence of insulin therapy," said Alison McNeilly, Principal Researcher from the University of Dundee in Scotland.
"This work demonstrates that by improving the body's own antioxidant defence system we can reverse some of the side effects associated with diabetes such as poor cognitive function," McNeilly added.
For the study, the team used insulin to induce repeated bouts of low blood sugar in a mouse model of Type-1 diabetes.
One group of mice were also dosed with the vegetable-derived antioxidant sulforaphane (SFN).
Findings, presented at the Society for Endocrinology annual conference in Glasgow, demonstrated that mice treated with SFN showed increased expression of antioxidant markers and decreased free radical cell damage.
In addition, SFN significantly improved cognitive ability in memory tasks.
The concentration of SFN would not be attainable in a normal diet rich in vegetables, according to McNeilly.
However, there are numerous highly potent compounds in clinical trials which may prevent cognitive impairments caused by free radicals to help diabetes patients, McNeilly noted.
The study showed that acute or worsening heart failure was the most frequent target organ injury (49.6 per cent) followed by non-ST elevation myocardial infarction -- type of heart attack (41.7 per cent).
Diabetic and non-diabetic patients had similar rates of target organ injuries.
"Our study found that both diabetics and non-diabetics with hypertensive emergencies had similar rates of severe injury to target organs," said Irina Benenson, Assistant Professor at the Rutgers University in the US.
"Combined with the fact that diabetics with hypertensive emergency also had significantly higher levels of blood pressure, this suggests that the occurrence of severe damage to vital organs is not because of just diabetes but because of the accompanying severely elevated blood pressure" Benenson added.
For the study, the team included 783 diabetics and 1,001 non-diabetic patients from African-American communities.
The risk of high BP in diabetics was significantly higher in those with cardiovascular conditions, kidney disease and anemia, and that having medical insurance and access to a healthcare provider did not lessen complications of severely elevated blood pressure, according to the research.
The study found that extremely high BP is responsible for severe life-threatening impairment of one or more organ systems especially to the brain and kidneys.
It also increased the risk of cardiovascular disease in diabetic patients by 57 per cent.
The most effective way to prevent life-threatening complications of extreme hypertension among patients with diabetes is to better control their BP.
In people with Type 2 diabetes, high glucose levels lead to poor blood circulation and nerve damage, making the body more vulnerable to infections, especially after surgery.
Sleep disorders can also weaken the immune system and slow down the healing process.
Sleep disorders and Type 2 diabetes have been intimately connected as it has been widely documented that lack of sleep can create metabolic changes like those seen in patients with insulin resistance.
"This is a public health issue, and we want to contribute to a solution," said Ralph Lydic, from the University of Tennessee in the US.
The research, appearing in the journal SLEEP, was performed on mice and showed that those with fragmented sleep needed about 13 days for their wounds to achieve 50 per cent healing.
Conversely, even with sleep interruptions, the wounds of normal weight healthy mice reached the same milestone in about five days.
For the experiment, scientists used obese mice with features of Type 2 diabetes and compared them to healthy mice of normal weight.
While deeply anesthetised, both groups of mice got a small surgical wound on the skin of their backs.
The scientists analysed how long it took the wound to heal under two scenarios: a normal sleep schedule and sleep that was repeatedly interrupted.
The researchers observed that overweight mice with Type 2 diabetes and disrupted sleep needed more time to heal skin wounds than mice that also had disrupted sleep but didn't have type 2 diabetes.
"Next we want to explore the effect that specific drugs have on wound healing in these same groups of mice with disrupted sleep," Lydic said.
For up to 40 million people with Type-1 diabetes worldwide, a painful needle prick once or twice daily is necessary for delivering the insulin that their bodies cannot produce on their own, and failing to adhere to the regimen (due to pain, phobia of needles) can lead to poor glycemic control causing serious health complications.
The new approach carries insulin in an ionic liquid comprised of choline and geranic acid that is then put inside a capsule with an acid-resistant enteric coating.
"Once ingested, insulin must navigate a challenging obstacle course before it can be effectively absorbed into the bloodstream," said Samir Mitragotri, Professor at the Harvard University.
"Our approach is like a Swiss Army knife, where one pill has tools for addressing each of the obstacles that are encountered," he added.
The enteric coating is biocompatible, easy to manufacture, and can be stored for up to two months at room temperature without degrading
This polymer coating resists the breakdown by gastric acids in the gut as well as dissolves when it reaches a more alkaline environment in the small intestine, where the ionic liquid carrying insulin is released.
The choline-geranic acid formulation also was shown to be adept at penetrating two final barriers - the layer of mucus lining the intestine and the tight cell junctions of the intestine wall, through which large-molecule drugs such as insulin cannot easily pass.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also showed that the oral delivery of insulin could also mitigate many of the disease's life-threatening side effects that result from patients failing to give themselves required injections.
"It has been the holy grail of drug delivery to develop ways to give protein and peptide drugs like insulin by mouth, instead of injection," the researchers said.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the bandage healed diabetic wounds 33 per cent faster than one of the most popular bandages currently on the market.
"The novelty is that we identified a segment of a protein in skin that is important to wound healing, made the segment and incorporated it into an antioxidant molecule that self-aggregates at body temperature to create a scaffold that facilitates the body's ability to regenerate tissue at the wound site," said lead author Guillermo Ameer from the Northwestern University in Illinois, US.
The logic behind the regenerative bandage is laminin -- a protein found in most of the body's tissues including the skin.
Laminin sends signals to cells, encouraging them to differentiate, migrate and adhere to one another. The team identified a segment of laminin -- 12 amino acids in length -- called A5G81 that is critical for the wound-healing process.
They incorporated A5G81 into an antioxidant hydrogel bandage that it previously developed in the laboratory. The antioxidant nature also helps counters inflammation.
Hydrogel liquid can form the exact shape of the wound which makes this bandage better than others.
"Wounds have irregular shapes and depths. Our liquid can fill any shape and then stay in place. Other bandages are mostly based on collagen films or sponges that can move around and shift away from the wound site," Ameer said.
The team also used animal models to test the effectiveness and found no adverse effects of the bandage on the animals.
Ameer also added that their bandage can be rinsed off with cool saline, so the regenerating tissue remains undisturbed.
People with Type-2 diabetes tend to have higher levels of the 'bad' low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol which is a risk factor for heart diseases. As eggs themselves are high in dietary cholesterol, diabetics are generally advised to avoid consuming eggs.
But the findings, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that eggs have little effect on the levels of cholesterol in the blood of people eating them.
"Despite differing advice around safe levels of egg consumption for people with pre-diabetes and Type-2 diabetes, our research indicates that people do not need to hold back from eating eggs if this is part of a healthy diet," said study co-author Nicholas Fuller from the University of Sydney.
"A healthy diet as prescribed in this study emphasised replacing saturated fats -- such as butter -- with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats -- such as avocado and olive oil," Fuller added.
In the initial trial of the study, 128 participants aimed to maintain their weight while embarking on a high-egg (12 eggs per week) or low-egg (less than two eggs per week) diet, with no difference in cardiovascular risk markers identified at the end of three months.
The same participants then embarked on a weight loss diet for an additional three months, while continuing their high or low egg consumption.
For a further six months -- up to 12 months in total -- participants were followed up by researchers and continued their high or low egg intake.
The extended study tracked a broad range of cardiovascular risk factors including cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure, with no significant difference in results between the high egg and low egg groups.
At all stages, both groups showed no adverse changes in cardiovascular risk markers and achieved equivalent weight loss -- regardless of their level of egg consumption, the researcher explained.
The findings are important due to the potential health benefits of eggs for people with pre-diabetes and Type-2 diabetes as well as the general population, the research said.
"Eggs are a source of protein and micronutrients that could support a range of health and dietary factors including helping to regulate the intake of fat and carbohydrate, eye and heart health, healthy blood vessels and healthy pregnancies," Fuller noted.
In a paper published in the journal Micromachines, the researchers demonstrated a self-powered, wearable and disposable patch that allows for non-invasive monitoring of glucose in human sweat.
This wearable, single-use biosensor integrates a vertically stacked, paper-based glucose/oxygen enzymatic fuel cell into a standard Band-Aid adhesive patch.
"The paper-based device attaches directly to skin, wicks sweat to a reservoir where chemical energy is converted to electrical energy, and monitors glucose without external power and sophisticated readout instruments," said Seokheun Choi, Assistant Professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Today's most widespread methods for glucose self-testing involve monitoring glucose levels in blood.
Conventional measurements, however, are not suitable for preventing hypoglycemia (low blood glucose) during exercise, Choi said.
This is because the underlying process relies on invasive and inconvenient blood sampling, causing the possibility of sample contamination and skin irritation with sweat containing various electrolytes and proteins, Choi said.
Moreover, the method needs patients to carry many accessories during physical activity, including lancets, alcohol swabs and a relatively large glucometer.
"The technique requires a sophisticated electrochemical sensing technique and sufficient electrical energy, which makes the technique difficult to be fully integrated in a compact and portable fashion," Choi added.
On the other hand, sweat-based glucose sensing is attractive for managing exercise-induced hypoglycemia because the measurement is performed during or immediately after exercise when there is enough sweat to obtain an adequate sample.
"The sensing platform holds considerable promise for efficient diabetes management, and a fully integrated system with a simple readout can be realised toward continuous non-invasive glucose monitoring," the researchers wrote.
Heart disease is a major cause of death worldwide, and obesity is a major risk factor. Body mass index, a common measure of obesity, has been recently shown to be an imperfect metric because it does not distinguish between lean muscle mass and fat mass.
When issues related to obesity are studied, suitable metrics that describe obesity accurately are extremely important.
For the study, the researchers analysed data on 10,251 adults from the ACCORD study, a randomized controlled trial in the US looking at diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD).
The mean age was almost 63 years, and 62 per cent of participants were men.
The research, published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal), showed that people with Type-2 diabetes and higher fat mass were at increased risk of major cardiovascular events compared to people with lower fat mass.
In contrast to the previous research, the protective role of lean body mass was not observed in the research population with Type-2 diabetes as a whole.
"We found that the protective effect of lean body mass was observed in participants with a lean BMI of less than 16.7 kg/m2," said Xinqun Hu, Departments of Cardiovascular Medicine and Emergency Medicine, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University in Changsha, Hunan, China.
"The increased risk of cardiovascular disease in (type 2 diabetes mellitis) patients with lower BMI may be attributed to the adverse effect of lower lean body mass that overrides the positive effect of lower fat mass."