Advances in diabetes: closer to a “normal” life, but far from a permanent cure

Start treatment diabetes Ultimately, it is a chimera that experts still see in the distant future – “We have a long way to go” – even as they celebrate the arrival of new treatments on the market that are bringing patients’ lives back to normal. millions of Spaniards suffer from this disease.

Head of the Endocrinology Department of the Salamanca Hospital –Teresa Mories– indicates that, with some exceptions, “one cannot speak in general terms about the treatment of diabetes.” Such exceptions are, for example, “pancreas transplantation in some selected patients with type 1 diabetes” or also “remission of type 2 diabetes in some patients with less advanced diabetes and high degrees of obesity who achieve significant weight loss after bariatric surgery or intensive treatment .

In the absence of that great scientific achievement that makes it possible to defeat all types of diabetes, endocrinologists list recent advances that have improved the quality of life patients, as well as “drugs that have been able to stop the progression of type 1 diabetes when it is in the early stages, and there is still a reserve of insulin-producing pancreatic cells that these molecules can protect from immune damage.” .

Teresa Mories adds that “another thing that is being worked on is stem cell transplantation, which will be able to transform in the body into insulin-producing beta cells, but these are very preliminary results,” she notes.

Statistics demonstrate the importance of these areas of research, given that in Spain About 5.1 million people live with diabeteswhich represents a 42% increase from 2019.

More than five million people with a very high mortality rate. “Mortality related to diabetes varies by region,” they explain in the Endocrinology Service of the Salamanca Health Complex, which presents reports for 2021 in which it is estimated that “in Spain there are more than 80,000 deaths related to diabetes in the age of range from 20 to 79 years,” as well as other data that suggests that “1.7% of deaths in people under the age of 60 may be related to diabetes.”