User:Musiqproanimus/Diabetes and Gene Therapy

Overview
Diabetes is a disease typically characterized by the pancreas' diminished ability, or lack thereof, to produce a vital hormone, Insulin. this condition hat typically been treated with a synthetically produced insulin, but recently, there have been advances in medical science and Gene therapy that could make diabetes a thing of the past.

What is Diabetes?
Diabetes Mellitus, or simply Diabetes, is a group of metabolic disorders that are classified into 3 categories: Insulin-Dependent-Diabetes (IDD), also known as type-1 diabetes or "juvenile diabetes"; Non-Insulin-Dependent-Diabetes (NIDD), also known as type-2 or "adult Diabetes"; and Gestational Diabetes, which only occurs in pregnant women.

Type-1 Diabetes
Type-1 diabetes, or Insulin-Dependent Diabetes (IDD), is also commonly referred to as "Juvenile diabetes" because it typically occurs in children and is typically diagnosed at birth or shortly after. Type-1 diabetes is characterized by a lack of beta cells in the body. Beta cells are a type of cell that reside in the pancreas, and these cells are what produces insulin in the body.

Type-2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes, or Non-Insulin-Dependent Diabetes (NIDD), is most commonly referred to as simply diabetes, or "adult diabetes", because it typically only occurs in adults though it can occur in children as well. Type-2 diabetes is characterized usually by a condition known as insulin resistance, where the body becomes resistant to the insulin produced by the pancreas, due to lack of exercise and excessive weight.

Gestational Diabetes
A third type of Diabetes, known as gestational diabetes, only occurs during pregnancy. This type of diabetes is caused by the strain placed on a woman's body during the gestational period, which can cause blood sugars to rise, which is caused a decline in the pancreas ability to produce sufficient insulin for the body during pregnancy.

Historical Discovery and Treatments
Historically, the first recorded cases of diabetes date as far back as 1425, in an Old English medical text, It could only be diagnosed by ants being attracted to people's urine. The link to pancreatic function  was then later discovered by Joseph Von Mering  an Oscar  Minkowski in 1889, by noting that dogs whose pancreas has been removed exhibited the same symptoms as humans with diabetes. The lack of insulin hormone was then later discovered by Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schaefer in 1910. Diabetes was treated with a variety of methods,which included, but was not limited to, exercise, dieting, alcohol consumption, overfeeding, Etc.

Discovery of Insulin
Insulin was then discovered in 1921 by two men by the names of Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best. See the continuation of the experiments done by Von Mering and Minkowski, they took insulin from the pancreata of healthy dogs and injected it into dogs whose pancreata were removed and discovered that the symptoms of diabetes were reversed.This then led to Banting and Best, along with another man by the name of Collip, taking insulin from the pancreata of cows and purifying it to be used as a General treatment for diabetes. Today, insulin is synthesized using recombinant DNA technology and a specific strain of E coli bacteria to create a synthetic form of insulin that is nearly identical to the insulin naturally produced by the human body.

Gene Therapy as a Future Treatment
In 2018, doctors and researchers at the universitat autonoma de Barcelona conducted an experiment where they introduced a compound called an adeno-associated viral vector, which was carrying the fgf21, or the fibroblast growth factor 21, gene to mice, which had either been nutritionally or genetically modified to be obese, and discovered that the introduction of this gene cause genetic manipulation of various tissues throughout the body of the mice to continually produced the fgf21 protein, which caused the mice to experience a decrease in weight and a decrease in insulin resistance, the two main factors of the onset of type 2 diabetes, with no long-term side effects. This research study gives high hopes that ther will be a cure for the soon-to-be epidemic of obesity and type-2 diabeted that is spreading throughout the world. Currently, there is no cure on the horizon for type-1 or gestational diabetes.