A team of researchers at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston has transmitted diabetes from mice to mice. To do this, they have injected into healthy rodents a protein that seems to be involved in the development of this disease and that bears similarities in its way of acting with prions, the proteins that, when altered, cause Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or disease of the ‘mad cows’.
So can diabetes be contagious, like a cold? No, but perhaps it could be transmitted through food or blood, according to the authors of the finding, although much remains to be investigated before reaching such a conclusion.
Dangerous proteins
The protein implicated in diabetes that scientists have inoculated into mice is the so-called islet amyloid polypeptide (IAPP). This substance tends to accumulate in the cells of the pancreas of people with type 2 diabetes, in which the body does not process insulin well (usually due to obesity and lack of exercise), the hormone responsible for regulate the amount of glucose in the blood.
This accumulation is reminiscent of that of infectious prions in the brains of cattle affected by Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, also called “mad cow disease”, since the affected cattle present alterations in their behavior: they are nervous and aggressive and suffer neurological changes, among many other symptoms.
Prions are common proteins in many animals and man, as well as cows; when they are altered and become infectious agents, they accumulate in the brain and can lead to death. The problem is that they are transmitted. One cow can infect another, and a person who eats the affected beef can develop this type of encephalopathy.
Malignant accumulations
In their work, scientists at the University of Texas have found that islet amyloid polypeptide (IAPP) acts like prions and triggers disease by accumulating abnormally. When IAPP was injected into the pancreas of the mice, they showed symptoms linked to type 2 diabetes. Their blood glucose levels were much higher than those of other rodents , among other metabolic indicators of this disease.
One of the authors of the research, the neurobiologist and biochemist Claudio Soto, affirms that ” we can transmit type 2 diabetes just by administering this protein , although this does not mean that the disease can be transmitted between people in the way it is. makes the flu. ” And he adds that he and his colleagues plan to study whether the disease spreads in the same ways as prions, for example through blood transfusions or organ transplants.
Soto thinks that humans may be more likely to develop type 2 diabetes if they eat meat from animals whose pancreas has begun to accumulate IAPP , but some scientists doubt this. In statements to the journal Science, biochemist David Harris, of the Boston University School of Medicine, affirms that the possibility of contagion of diabetes between people is “overestimated”. According to him, researchers have transmitted this disease in an artificial way. “Injecting cells from the pancreas of mice with diabetes into other mice is a laboratory experiment. You are not going to have situations like that with human pancreas.”
