Fat-Fighting Drug Reverses Diabetes and Lowers Cholesterol

Newsmax Health ^ | August 28, 2009 | Maggie Fox

[RolandTignor]

Researchers searching for a cure for obesity said on Thursday they have developed a drug that not only makes mice lose weight, but reverses diabetes and lowers their cholesterol, too.

The drug, which they have dubbed fatostatin, stops the body from making fat, instead releasing the energy from food. They hope it may lead to a pill that would fight obesity, diabetes and cholesterol, all at once.

Writing in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Salih Wakil of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, Motonari Uesugi of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues said the drug interferes with a suite of genes turned on by overeating.

"Here, we are tackling the basics," Wakil said in a telephone interview. "I think that is what excited us."

Scientists are painfully aware that drugs that can make mice thin do nothing of the sort in humans. A hormone called leptin can make rats and mice drop weight almost miraculously but does little or nothing for an obese person, for instance.

But Wakil, whose team has patented the drug and is looking for a drug company to partner with, hopes this drug may be different. "I am very, very optimistic," he said.

Fatostatin is a small molecule, meaning it has the potential to be absorbed in pill form.

It works on so-called sterol regulatory element binding proteins or SREBPs, which are transcription factors that activate genes involved in making cholesterol and fatty acids.

"Fatostatin blocked increases in body weight, blood glucose, and hepatic (liver) fat accumulation in (genetically) obese mice, even under uncontrolled food intake," the researchers wrote.

Genetic tests showed the drug affected 63 different genes.

The idea of interfering with SREBP is not new. GlaxSmithKline has been working on a new-generation cholesterol drug that uses this pathway.

After four weeks, mice injected with fatostatin weighed 12 percent less and had 70 percent lower blood sugar levels, the researchers wrote.

Now they plan to test rats and rabbits, Wakil said.

The drug also had effects on prostate cancer cells they said -- something that may help explain links between prostate cancer and obesity.

[Vinnie]

bump

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I’ve been doing a lot of study into this recently, and it does get complicated. To start with, while mast cells can release Histamine-1, and Benedryl, a Histamine-1 inhibitor, will interfere with it, it likely has little or no effect on the mast cells themselves, just on one of their products when they are degranulating.

To make matters a lot more confusing, there are about 150 cytokine and histamine chemicals and free radicals that work together, and we are still trying to figure out which do what, and to which others they do it to. Histamine-2, as an example, is responsible for acid reflux, so you can block it directly, with OTC H-2 inhibitors like Zantac, or you can slow down its production with the newer “proton pump” drugs.

As one researcher put it, he figured out that to become an expert in this stuff, you have to master the art of creating large wall charts with small text and lots of multicolored straight and dotted connecting lines on them.

Importantly, this research into obesity and diabetes directly impacts the study of influenza as well as a host of other diseases.

[hennie pennie]

Thanks for this interesting information. I am unable to take benedryl by mouth, as I will fall asleep for about 48 hours, and then remain very groggy for several days thereafter. Before I started using a neti pot, occasionally my sinuses became so inflamed that sometimes at bedtime, I would rub benedryl cream into my forehead, then take a very hot bath - and somehow this did seem to relieve the sinus pressure & pain without knocking me out for days, although I would still get pretty groggy.

I’ll have to get over to google and find out what mast cell tumors are, sometime today!

Thanks again.

[hennie pennie]

Thanks so much for sharing your expertise with me — I was certain that this topic was going to be much more complicated than the news articles I’ve come across were making it out to be.

This is really EXCITING research, and I hope something comes of it, soon, to eradicate the obesity epidemic and plague of type 2 diabetes.

I’m going to print out your posting, so that when I attempt to research this on my own, that I won’t be “hoodwinked” by excrutiatingly dumbed-down articles — something I seem to be encountering more & more on the Internet.... a simplified idea, while not altogether inaccurate, is simply not entirely correct — then gets repeated ad infinitum until it looks like The Truth to a layperson like myself.

It’s quite disconcerting to spend hours researching stuff above my head, and then weeks later, when my understanding is better, to realize that I’d been ‘hood winked,’ yet again with very partial information. :)

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The irony is that researchers and experts aren’t much better off than someone who surfs the net. Even back in the 1960s, doctors were overwhelmed by the amount of research and breakthrough discoveries. They could either help their patients, or keep up with research, but not both.

And just a few years ago, as an example, it was realized that the standards and medicines for cardiac care were wildly different around the country, even in neighboring hospitals. They only found out when it was noticed that cardiac patients lived at some hospitals and died at other hospitals.

Just last year, much to everyone’s surprise, it was learned that a lot of emergency room doctors were doing intubation, sticking a tube down someone’s throat so they could breathe, wrong. This was because while they had been told how to do it in medical school, they had never actually *seen* it done, except on the TV show “ER”, where they did it wrong. And did it wrong on the show a lot, like seven times in one season.

For this reason, hospitals are being encouraged to create procedure seminars. (”Uh, no, Ernie, you don’t put the tourniquet around the neck. That would be bad.”)

So the important thing to remember is if you or a loved one have a medical condition, to do your own research. While this doesn’t make you an expert, at least you can talk to a real expert, and they can figure out if there is something there that needs investigation.

It’s a real motivator when you can show the doctor a printout of some research on the subject, and it’s interesting enough for them to find out, one way or another.

[chris_bdba]

A blood glusclose of 300 does not cause all of that to happen. If it did then anyone who ate any large meal would be in danger. The damage comes from it staying there for extended periods of time. Almost any normal person who would have a BG doen 1 hour after a large meal will test in the 200-300 BG range, it’s whether it comes back down on it’s own is what makes diabetics and non diabetics different.

[hennie pennie]

Thanks for your further input - fascinating information!

Say, I am really curious - are you following the research with CAFFEINE, that there will soon be human trials with Alzheimer’s patients because a group of researchers actually reversed Alzheimer’s in a bunch of rats OR mice, by giving them the equivalent of what in human terms would be 5 cups of coffee a day.

The articles mentioned that by giving caffeine to humans that the plaques in the bloodstream immediately decreased, just like in the lab animals.

I was going to buy STOCK in whomever manufactures No-Doz, until I determined that the generic forms of caffeine are just as good as the brand name.

Several other freepers are taking caffeine supplements, too — in one of the Alzh.D threads, a poster mentioned that Vitacost carried the least expensive caffeine.

It’s my impression, though that ANY type of caffeine pill is much less expensive than its equivalent in actual coffee — a very expensive commodity, indeed. :)

Also — do you happen to have any idea why ALCOHOL, as in alcoholic drinks, is starting to recur as a factor in elderly adults NOT getting any form of dementia? Is alcohol a ‘major’ anti-inflammatory?

[Mom MD]

Actually it has to do with absorption in the duodenum. Some studies have showed if a stent (metal tube) is placed in the duodenum preventing absorption, it will have a similar effect on diabetes. Interesting stuff....

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Ooowee, did you pick a couple of enigmas: Alzheimer’s, and alcohol.

Alzheimer’s is one of those diseases so loaded with what looks like obvious clues that it should be easy to solve, but finding a solution to it is terribly difficult.

For example, in some ways it seems to be just the opposite of schizophrenia, almost mutually exclusive of each other. If someone gets one, they almost never get the other. The blood of schizophrenics is loaded with naturally occurring nitrous oxides, in Alzheimer’s patients, far less than normal, almost none. But then, a dead end. The parallels and opposites just seems to be coincidental. Maybe.

Metals, such as aluminum, seemed to be a “smoking gun” with Alzheimer’s. Very obviously. But they didn’t pan out, either. No real relationship. One of its big symptoms are plaque in the brain. But the plaque can be treated, yet the Alzheimer’s remains.

The same with genetics. Childhood diseases. Adult and family diseases. Ethnic groups. Diet, exercise, intelligence, even age. They all seem to have *some* relationship, but it doesn’t work when you check it out.

So, they keep looking.

As far as alcohol goes, I once listened to a very entertaining rant by a biochemical psychiatrist against alcohol. In short, the brain has a lot of minute chemicals, perhaps hundreds (we don’t know), that are immensely powerful, and very interrelated with each other. Some of them only last a fraction of a second but can change our lives.

And alcohol is the only known substance that can mess them all up.

He would work with a patient for months with a whole selection of very specific drugs, trying to find the one that would help them out. And then they would go on a drinking bender, and everything would be scrambled. So they would have to start over.

Take these hundreds of brain chemicals, add the 50 or so liver chemicals, the 150 or so cytokines, the various hormones (only a decade ago we discovered that the heart actually secretes a small amount of a hormone—what it does, we don’t know.) And you’ve got a puzzle on your hands.

One scientist pointed out that the reason everything is so complicated is because people are too cold. “If we were just 200 degrees warmer, everything, all these chemical processes, would be easy!”

[hennie pennie]

They've known for many decades that heavy coffee drinkers seemed to have a lower incidence of both Parkinson's Disease and of Alzh.D.

But it was only a few months ago that they discovered that Caffeine was the "magic bullet" in rats/mice, for reversing the plaques.

And a couple weeks ago there were reports that veterans who experienced PTSD have a far greater chance to develop a dementia later in life.

There is also some interesting items about dementia unblocking repressed memories -- and there are some elderly patients who never had PTSD, but who are currently having violent nightmares about their experiences during WW II.

Then there's this VERY peculiar article, which is way too politically incorrect to appear in the Western press, I don't know what to make of it.

Breaking News:

Heavy drinking 'cuts dementia risk'

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-4940183,prtpage-1.cms

People who drink up to 28 drinks a week in later life are less likely to develop dementia than people who abstain from alcohol consumption, according to a new study.

Professor Kaarin Anstey, from Canberra's Australian National University, and colleagues compiled data from 15 international studies, including responses from more than 10,000 people.

They found that drinkers are better off when it comes to developing diseases affecting cognitive function, reports the Daily Telegraph....

[MetaThought]

Did they distinguish between correlation and causation ?

Could it be that people capable of drinking 28 drinks a week are not susceptible to Alz/PD ?

[hennie pennie]

I don’t think so.

All I could think of was that maybe these people have “super” livers and that is why they don’t suffer from such huge amounts of alcohol and why they age so healthily that they never develop dementia.

THAT is alot of drinking, week after week after week.

LOL