Common viruses could cause child diabetes
two investigations published on Thursday provided evidence that common viruses could cause childhood diabetes, which would pave the way to develop possible vaccines against this disease, researchers indicated.
A team showed that enterovirus, which normally cause colds, vomiting or diarrhea, were frequently found in the pancreas of dead young people recently due to type 1 diabetes, but not in healthy samples.
This suggests that a virus could unleash the disease in genetically predisposed children to diabetes, which affects about 440,000 people around the world, said Alan Foulis, of the Royal Infirmary of Glasgow, who worked on one of the studies.
"The story that arises is that there is a viral infection that precedes the appearance of autoimmunity," said the expert in a press conference."There is the idea that we are observing the culprit."
Type 1 diabetes is caused by the destruction of beta cells of the pancreas, which produce the insulin necessary to regulate blood sugar levels.
This autoimmune disease is different from the most common way, called type 2 diabetes, which is closely related to obesity.
Genetics plays an important role in diabetes, but experts know that other factors, such as diet, are also important.Viruses have long been suspected of being a trigger, the team added.
Foulis and his colleagues examined 73 pancreatic samples of young people who had died from diabetes and found that 60 percent of the donated organs had tests of entire infection in beta cells.
Instead, they barely found beta cells infected with samples taken from 50 children without diabetes, the authors reported in the Diabetologia magazine.
The team also found a wide proportion of these infected cells in adults with type 2 diabetes, suggesting that viruses could also boost this form of the disease in some people.
mutations of a gene
A second study, from the University of Cambridge, found that rare mutations in a gene involved in the body's immune response reduced the risk of developing youth diabetes.
British experts observed 480 young people with type 1 diabetes and 480 healthy people to identify the gene and variants involved.
"We detected a specific gene, which acts as a warning report of viral infection," said John Todd, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked in the study, published in the Science magazine.
"We not only find a specific gene but also that gene has an enigmatic function in the management of viral infection," said the scientist.
While Todd warned that many environmental factors beyond viruses could contribute to type 1 diabetes, Foulis and his colleagues indicated that they wanted to reduce the amount of about 100 enterovirus, to find which ones would play the most important papers.
Doing this and understanding how the cells respond to viral infection are steps towards the development of a vaccine that could one day protect the diabetes boys, Foulis said.
"The goal would be a vaccine that would avoid many of the cases of type 1 diabetes (currently registered)," added the expert.
