Type 2 Diabetes - Will There Ever Be a Cure for Diabetes?

If you've been diagnosed with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, or worse if someone you love has, you would be perfectly justified in feeling greatly frustrated at how there isn't a cure for it in sight. After all, illnesses like the bubonic plague, which used to kill people in short order, can now be "killed off" in a matter of weeks using antibiotics, and cancers which were lethal to our parents' generation can now be removed with, well, surgical precision (or nuked into non-issues using chemotherapy and radiation therapy).

Certainly a disease like diabetes shouldn't be so difficult to handle, right? Unfortunately, it is and it isn't a disease we can whip like that. Expecting a cure is likely to leave you disappointed.

Unfortunately, no one has yet been able to figure out why the autoimmune response is triggered in Type 1 diabetics. This is what causes beta cells in the pancreas to be killed by the person's own immune system, without any known regard to anything besides the person's genes. Other than a eugenics program where Type 1 diabetics (and those who have recessive genes for such a thing) were forbidden from having any children, stopping that could get tricky. While gene therapy has left its infancy, it's still a toddler with a long way to go. This isn't a TV show, where we can just give someone a shot and change the parts of their DNA that cause damage. At this stage of the game, getting rid of Type 1 diabetes that way might end up causing them to grow several types of cancer, or mess with their testosterone and estrogen levels. The human body is insanely complicated, after all.

Hope is not lost, however. With insulin, even the most brittle Type 1 diabetic can live a long, healthy life.

Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease that must be managed for the rest of your life. Although good management will certainly help you rein in Type 2 right now, medical breakthroughs could occur over the next few years and these could change how medical science handles this disease. No one knows when the cure for Type 2 may come, or if it ever will. More than likely, progress in eradicating diabetes will be incremental, coming in thousands of small steps rather than one dramatic breakthrough.

In the case of Type 2 diabetes, the closest we're likely to get to a cure is in prevention; a great deal of current research focuses on identifying people with Type 2 diabetes at an earlier stage of their disease, or even before diabetes develops. Scientists may one day conclude Type 2 diabetes is easier to prevent than to treat. But, for now, good self-management can hold diabetes at bay for a long while.

There is no doubt Type 2 diabetes is aggravated by lifestyle choices. If you practice a healthy diet in which your Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load are fairly low, and you exercise regularly, the effects of this version of diabetes can reduce to the point of being nearly unnoticeable. While continuing to work out and keeping up a reasonably healthy diet isn't a cure in the sense of a pill you can pop to make this go away, it is as curative as we are likely to get in the near future. So just live a healthy life, and forget the magic bullets.
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Clicking on this link will help you to learn more about Type 2 Diabetes... Beverleigh Piepers RN... the Diabetes Detective.

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