For Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute researcher Dr Bianca Bernardo diabetes is personal.
“I’ve got relatives with diabetes and my grandparents passed away from heart disease and the drive to improve health outcomes for people with these conditions is definitely a motivator,” Dr Bernardo says.
The links between prediabetes and depression are well established, now a new study at the University of Sydney is looking at a novel way of helping people treat both conditions at the same time.
Dr Yorgi Mavros believes resistance training, which some people might know as weight training, might be a good way for older Australians both to get active and manage depression and stop or slow the progression of type 2 diabetes.
Heart disease is one of the major complications of diabetes. It can take many forms that affect different parts of the heart.
One type of heart disease, left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), involves the enlargement and thickening of the wall of the heart’s main pumping chamber, the left ventricle. LVH is more common in people with type 2 diabetes and can lead to heart failure.
Lipids are molecules that form the building blocks of the cells comprising our bodies.
When some lipids build up, especially in the liver and the muscles, it can lead to insulin resistance. This can lead to type 2 diabetes.
Scientists don’t know exactly which lipids trigger insulin resistance, but they have a couple of prime suspects.
Research into Gestational diabetes is the fastest growing type of diabetes in Australia and this is why it is important mothers get the best possible care.
The Diabetes Australia Research Trust is funding an important study being undertaken by a team at the University of Queensland and involving Dr Helen Barrett, the Director of Endocrinology at Mater Hospital Brisbane and a Senior Research Fellow at Mater Research into if probiotics can help women with gestational diabetes.
Most of us know that insulin plays an important role in removing excess glucose from the blood, but did you know it isn’t the only molecule involved in the process? Another molecule that plays a role is glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1).
When Simon Kitching was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in his early 30s he admits he put his head in the sand, hoping it would “go away” if he just took his tablets.
Despite watching his own father struggle with the complications of type 2 diabetes for many years and knowing it ran in his family, Simon didn’t take serious steps to change his lifestyle and manage his own type 2 diabetes until a few years later.
Not everybody responds to medicines in the same way. For instance, some common type 2 diabetes medications have serious side effects for some people while they just aren’t effective in others.
That’s why the University of Melbourne’s Professor Matthew Watt and his team are currently studying a protein called SMOC1 to see if it could play a role in treating type 2 diabetes.
While there is strong evidence to support the view that some people have a genetic predisposition to type 1 diabetes, scientists still don’t understand what actually triggers the onset of the disease.
That’s why they can’t explain why, in some identical twins, one twin develops type 1 diabetes and the other doesn’t.
