Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus

Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus

Although Diabetes mellitus is a life-long disease, there are recent techniques for the treatment of diabetes mellitus. It is a condition of high levels of sugar in the blood. It has several types but there are two main types which are type 1 and type 2.

In early times, treatment and management focus on using drugs and insulin to decrease the levels of sugar in the blood. This means that they focus on adapting the case and keeping the levels stable.

In recent times, the medical field is in continuous development. There are new methods such as organ transplantation, medical operations, devices, and tools.

The new techniques include:

1. Islet cell transplantation.
2. Pancreas transplantation.
3. Insulin pump.
4. Other techniques.

Islet Cells Transplantation

Islet cell is a type of cell that is in our pancreas. It is responsible for insulin synthesis and release. Also, it is called the Islets of Langerhans.

What is this method? And who can benefit from it?

Transplantation is the introduction of cells, organs, etc… into the body or under the skin. In this method, doctors take healthy cells from the dead donors and transplant it into the patient’s pancreas. This method is still under investigation and clinical trials and under the supervision of the Food and drug administration organization (FDA). Clinical trials have started since 1995.

This method is useful if you are a type 1 patient. In type 1 the immunity abnormally attacks the pancreas islet cells and destroys them. It is for patients who are difficult to manage their blood sugar either the levels are high or low.

Pros of Islet Cells Transplantation

Dr/Shareen Forbes and Dr/Richard Oram are expert United kingdom doctors who say that this method has plenty of advantages to type 1 patient. These advantages include:

• Improvement and management of blood sugar levels.
• limited or no suffering of low blood sugar levels, which is can occur if you are a patient of diabetes or not.
• The ability to recognize if there are low levels of sugar in the blood.
• You will decrease the need for insulin injection or you won’t need it at all.
• Improvement and avoidance of secondary damage to the kidneys, eyes, nerves, and heart.

Cons of Islet Cells Transplantation

The disadvantages are major and minor. They include:

• The pain associated with the transplantation.
• The method requires repetition in order to succeed and show promising results.

Normally, our immunity tends to resist and refuse any foreign cells, organs, and bodies. So there is always a worry that the recipient patient’s body may refuse and not respond to the donor cells.

• In any transplantation, doctors use an immunosuppressant. An immunosuppressant is a drug which decreases the immunity response in order to decrease the immunity attack on the new cells and organs.

The use of immunosuppressants has its drawbacks that include:

1. The decrease in immunity response makes the patient a target to infections, The infection is sometimes dangerous and is life-threatening.
2. Suppressing immunity makes the patient vulnerable to cancer.
3. The patient’s body becomes weak and he/she is fatigue.
4. It is difficult to find healthy donor cells.
5. The method is expensive.

Another application of this method include:

Patients who have inflammation in their pancreas or in the case of doctors had removed the pancreas due to medical causes. This application doesn’t require the use of drugs to suppress immunity because they use the patient’s own cells. They already use this method for this purpose and it is not under investigation.

Different techniques of islet transplantation include:

1. Introducing the cells into your liver.
2. Introducing the cells under your skin.
3. Capsulating the cells to decrease the resistance of the immunity.
4. Capsulating and filtering the cells. The importance of filtration lay in removing the empty capsules that aim to decrease the amount of capsules injection.
5. Generating the cells from the stem cells of the patient himself/herself. Stem cells are a very important type of cell in our body, they are the beginning of all cells in our body.

Transplantation of the Pancreas

The pancreas is one of our body organs that doctors can replace due to different conditions and diseases that damage the pancreas such as severe inflammation, viral infection, accidents, etc…

To focus on our subject we will talk about pancreas transplantation and the management and treatment of diabetes. Pancreas transplantation includes:

• Transplantation of the kidney and the pancreas together.
• The transplantation of the kidney followed by the pancreas.
• The transplantation of the pancreas alone.

The replacement of the pancreas is useful for a type 1 patient. The replacement includes three ways:

• Taking the pancreas from a dead donor and giving it to the patient.