Word: insulin
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Diabetes mellitus, a disease characterized by the body's inability to make an essential blood sugar, insulin, is complicated by cell dysfunction, particularly in the retina. Wald's research examines the blood flow in the retina in the early stages of diabetes, before any retinal disease has developed...
...their own. Over the past five years, doctors have developed more and more treatments to control the opportunistic infections and illnesses that appear in other patients. Scientists may not discover a cure, but if they learn how to control an HIV infection the way diabetes can be managed with insulin, they will have tamed one of the most feared killers of the 20th century...
...sense, scientists already know what causes juvenile-onset diabetes, a disease that afflicts about 1.5 million Americans. For some reason, the body's immune system attacks and destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Without insulin, the body is unable to process sugar into energy. Even with daily insulin shots, diabetics run a high risk of blindness, kidney failure and heart disease. But why does the immune system go on the attack...
...higher than normal level of antibodies to a protein in cow's milk called bovine serum albumin; their bodies have targeted the protein as an invader to be destroyed. By a terrible coincidence, a section of this milk protein is almost identical to a protein on the surface of insulin-producing cells. When these people are sensitized to milk, the theory goes, they are also sensitized to their own cells, leading to the cells' destruction...
...That prompted a Paris psychiatrist to try the drug on schizophrenics. Thorazine calmed patients and reduced their symptoms. It was quickly proclaimed a miracle drug. Thorazine and related drugs such as haloperidol, fluphenazine and thiothixene soon eclipsed the brutal treatments previously in vogue: lobotomy, primitive electroshock and artificially induced insulin shock. Over the next two decades, nearly half a million patients were discharged from state hospitals in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands more from hospitals in Europe...