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Type 2 diabetes, labelled a global health epidemic by the World Health Organization is now found to be possible contagious and capable of spreading through meat or blood transfusions, new research suggests.

The study has now found a previously undiscovered mechanism that raises the possibility of type 2 diabetes being transmitted in a way similar to infectious diseases such as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease). Ingesting protein ‘seeds’ may be responsible for the condition’s onset, similar to the spread of mad cow disease from cattle to humans via infected beef, the study author claims.

Led by researchers from the University of Texas, the study used mice to test whether clumps of a misfolded protein called amyloid polypeptide (IAPP) taken from a pancreas can spread and produce diabetes-like symptoms when transferred between individuals. Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, the study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don’t indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread

the disease.

Unlike type 1 diabetes, the type 2 is a condition that forms over time, reducing a person’s ability to produce or respond to insulin. The disease is far more common that type 1, affecting just under half a billion people worldwide, but its exact causes are still vague. Researchers have identified genetic and environmental factors, but there is still a lot to learn about how many people develop the condition.

Prions are misfolded proteins that can cause normally folded versions of the same protein to misfold themselves. When this conversion occurs in the brain, the distorted proteins bunch up inside cells and kill them. Although prion diseases are rare in people, they share some similarities with more common illnesses. These toxic clumps of proteins are often associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and Huntington disease. The clumps have additionally been associated with type 2 diabetes. But finding a link isn’t the same thing as identifying a cause, so researchers have now taken a closer look at the amyloid proteins in the pancreas to trace their pathology.

To test if these clumps could occur outside of the petri dish, the scientists injected seeds of the amyloid plaques and pancreatic material from the diabetic subjects into the transgenic mice.

In both cases plaques grew, and the mice displayed the symptoms of type 2 diabetes.
“We can induce the full-blown disease just by administering these protein aggregates,” lead researcher Claudio Soto from the University of Texas said. But you shouldn’t be too alarmed, because this demonstration of a communicable diabetes ‘agent’ doesn’t exactly make it a contagious disease. “It’s not like the flu,” Soto stresses.

The discovery is important as it poses a new way type 2 diabetes could form and spread through the pancreas, giving hope for earlier diagnosis and new treatments.

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