Researchers have made an important discovery about the causes of schizophrenia, a disease related to dementia or fragmented mentality. Researchers have identified two genes associated with the disease as well as a third gene that carries the risk of schizophrenia and autism. Scientists involved in this research believes, this discovery can go a long way in finding a cure for these kind of diseases. Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine found that these harmful genes are almost the same in every ethnic or racial group. The findings of this research were published in Nature Genetics . According to an estimate, about one percent of people worldwide suffering from schizophrenia. The scientists identified two risky genes, SRRM2 and AKAP11, based on a comparative analysis of gene sequencing from individuals with schizophrenia and healthy individuals. It compared a dataset of 35,828 patients with schizophrenia to 107,877 healthy or control groups and included a v...
A new thing has come to light about the case of insulin deficient diabetes type-1 patients. Researchers found that the pancreas of such patients is smaller than the pancreas of a healthy person.
Beta cells responsible for producing insulin make up a very small portion of the pancreas. Therefore, it was not expected to reduce the size of pancreas due to their degradation in type-1 diabetes.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center studied to a family living in Alabama and found that insulin deficiency, not autoimmune diabetes, is the primary cause of pancreatic shortening in type 1 diabetes. Four out of eight members of this family were suffering from monogenetic diabetes. It is caused by a rare mutation in the insulin gene.
This leads to insulin deficiency without autoimmunity. MRI of pancreas found that it was smaller in size and abnormal in shape in diabetic patients. This was similar to what was observed in individuals with type 1 diabetes.
The research was published in the Diabetes Care Journal of the American Diabetes Association. Daniel Moore, Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Ian Burr Division of Pediatrics Endocrinology and Diabetes, who was involved in this research, said: 'It is really amazing, from one family, we have been able to understand the process of a disease that affects millions of people around the globe. The number of such families is very less in which so many people are suffering from this type of disease'.
Nearly two decades ago, David Purcell and his wife, Ellen, agreed to cooperate in this research with their six children (who had been diagnosed with the disease).
A few years later, researchers at the University of Chicago's Kovler Diabetes Center, told her that she had monogenetic diabetes caused by a gene mutation in insulin, rather than type 1 diabetes.
"We knew that the pancreas is very small in people with type 1 diabetes, but there was need to good and effective model to understand what's really going on," said Wright, first author of the study and an instructor in the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism.
This is the first time we can say that insulin plays an important role in determining the size of the pancreas and its loss leads to a very small size of the pancreas.
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