How does obesity lead to type 2 diabetes?

Current thinking: Obesity impairs the signaling between the liver and fat cells.

New idea out of Rutgers: It’s actually caused by norepinephrine and epinephrine — those stress hormones counteract insulin’s effects, rather than blocking any signals.

How’d they figure it? First researchers created mice without stress hormones (catecholamines) outside of their central nervous systems^*. Then they overfed those mice, as well as normal mice. The genetically engineered mice didn’t develop diabetes.

So why not use catecholamine-blocking drugs? Interestingly, those don’t affect diabetes, so a next step is figuring out why. (It might be that those drugs “don’t block the relevant receptors or because they affect the brain and body in complex ways.”

You know the mantra: More research is needed.

^* Take a moment to appreciate how genetically engineering those mice was a minor step in the process and barely worth a mention. Welcome to the future.

ICYMI

Novavax continues combo-shot trial

Last month the FDA stopped Novavax’s trial of a combo flu-Covid vaccine because of a serious adverse effect on one patient. But the trial can now continue; it turns out that the patient has ALS, and his symptoms weren’t related to the vaccine.

Serious bird flu case in Canada

A Canadian teenager is in critical condition with a case of H5N1 bird flu. As of this writing, health officials in British Columbia don’t know how he or she contracted it. They assume it was contact with an animal, but the province hasn’t had any cases in dairy cattle, the usual animal culprit. The teen had no other health issues.

No heart failure? No beta blockers

People who have heart attacks are often given beta blockers as a matter of course, but a new Swedish study found that not only is that unnecessary, it can raise the risk of depression.

If a patient isn’t suffering from heart failure, the Swedes found, beta blockers don’t help. On the other hand, the side effects can be considerable: “[B]eta blockers are linked to negative side effects such as depression, difficulty sleeping, and nightmares.”

Vitamin D and BP

Overweight older people might be able to lower their blood pressure with vitamin D and calcium supplements. That’s the conclusion of a new study out of American University in Beirut, but it’s got caveats.

First, the participants had low vitamin D levels in their blood. Second, “[M]ore is not necessarily better when it comes to lowering blood pressure. The effect was independent of the dose administered.”

That implies something found in other studies: Getting vitamin D levels to 30 ng/mL or above can have a range of good health effects, but supplements won’t do much for people who aren’t vitamin D deficient.

Captain Obvious sells laetrile on the side

In a shock to absolutely no one, British researchers found that 81% of cancer “cures” promoted on TikTok were fake, and most were designed to sell those products to gullible people.

Worse, the fact that people buy into this tripe can also lead them down the road to other conspiracy theories (e.g., ‘the government is covering up a cancer cure’) and even radicalization.

[T]he cancer misinformation videos can become a gateway to more extreme, conspiratorial content. In the attention economy, content creators are encouraged to post increasingly salacious content, as this is incentivised by the algorithm and the creators stand to gain financially.

Gosh, I wonder why people have trust issues

A UNC professor’s research found that state medical boards rarely discipline physicians who spread health misinformation. Based on his analysis of “[more than] 3,100 medical board disciplinary proceedings across the nation’s five most populous states,” he found that “spreading misinformation to the public was the least common reason for physician discipline, accounting for just 0.1% of all disciplinary offenses.”

“There’s a striking disconnect between medical boards’ statements about the dangers of physician misinformation, as well as increasing public attention to the problem, and the actual enforcement actions.”

Non-pharma medical story of the week:
It has the utmost confidence in this surgery

An AI-powered robot has been trained to perform surgery by watching videos of human surgeons at work. And in then “executed the same surgical procedures as skillfully as the human doctors.”

Said one member of the team of Johns Hopkins and Stanford engineers who built the thing, “It’s really magical to have this model and all we do is feed it camera input and it can predict the robotic movements needed for surgery.”