Those are really good questions Scott! If we need to smoke and drink martinis to get “in shape” to qualify, I could probably do it?
Not a question, but please convey to Dr. Faustman how appreciative we are of her continuing work & efforts. I'd hug her if I met her.
These are such great questions. I second all of them.
Well, some procedures (most surgically invasive ones) require your A1c to be quite good, as they indicate a better ability to heal. Yet others (pancreas/kidney transplant) require your D to be sufficiently “uncontrolled” so that the risk is worth it.
I think I could maintain an OK A1C smoking and drinking. I guess I'm already doing ok and drink? I'm just kidding about smoking though. That's too extreme!
I thought that part of the advantage of BCG was that it wasn't hideously expensive, in which case were a protocol to be shown to be effective, they could pass it out with like cookies?
Only three people received the BCG during the first FDA approved trial.
They had 10 million dollars...the most expensive phase 1 trials in history.
I'm sure they found 3 local people...
Acid,U R a HOOT!!! I neither smoke nor drink, but the thought of you pumping it up to be ready for a "cure" is a little funny. Knowing your preferences, You will probably just run two extra miles a day to "get ready AND in shape".
Posters, you have all come up with great questions. I have donated blood three times to the Faustmann lab, and you have all come up with many questions that could have come to my mind.
God bless,
Brunetta
I DID hug her Gerri. Such a pleasant, enthusiastic woman!!!She probably will not remember me, but tell her Brunetta, the tall black long-term Type one female donor from Ohio, says "Hi"; and I will, hopefully, see her in the lab again this summer. (Like I havn't said this so already in comments to her website-lol).
Well, it's sort hazardous as, if you are "fine", then "sorry, no cure for you, you're FINE!" Thanks for your blood too Brunetta!
Why'd you cross out the "with".... isn't that the whole point? With the amount of money my family spends on Girl Scout cookies each year (and I don't even get to eat them!), you'd think they'd throw in some BCG for free. Kinda like the prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box.
The interview is now live! She replied to all the questions that had been posted in here until yesterday! :)
Good to hear her voice! I still think its a huge long shot that BCG on its own will be powerful and effective enough to actually reverse diabetes and get people off insulin. If I could be wrong about anything ever it would be about that. Its really sad with how long so many of the research companies having been plugging away at a solution we are still nowhere close to an effective treatment. Still I have no choice but to continue to be hopeful otherwise I have nothing.
This is a fascinating interview. I, like the mouse community, feel happier, and more hopeful as well. Thank you Dr. Faustman and Manny.
It will be very interesting to see an exact definition of a possible cure, such as what kind of limitations it would lift from a person's lifestyle - and if we can trust that it would be a permanent one.
Big smiles, Brunetta. I remember when you went to Boston.
Yeah, a very upbeat interview indeed. Positive energy is something we can all use in extra. The path to a diabetes cure is obviously tricky and still uncertain, but the important thing is to keep pushing and keep advocating and keep hoping.
wat is neurapathy and wat causes it i started with it in my bchest left side now its in my legs and i am strugglin 2 ealk i am on garbapentin and amytriptaline max dose but nothin is helpin.the pain and tinglin feelin is really gettin me down thanx sarah
Following up on this one 5½ yrs later, did we get any answers to the questions?
I think this is the video interview for which the questions were collected:
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Dr. Faustman is using BCG to diminish the autoimmune attack on pancreatic beta cells. BCG has been used for many decades to treat both tuberculosis and bladder cancer, and among those patients were no doubt many diabetics, but not one of them was ever cured of the disease by BCG: otherwise we would have discovered its curative potential long ago. Faustman knows that something else in addition to BCG must be added to stimulate the burned-out beta cells to regenerate sufficiently to produce enough insulin to make a clinical difference, but so far, nothing has worked. Sure, small increases in output are evident, but significant dose reductions in insulin are not possible, and the patient will always remain dependent on insulin injections.
Her actual goal I suspect is not to try to cure diabetes anymore by actually getting patients off injected insulin, but rather, just to revive damaged beta cells enough so that they produce more c-peptide, which is a molecule they naturally produce along with insulin molecules. While the miniscule increase in insulin output that can be achieved by Faustman’s methods won’t make any clinical difference, even the very slight boost in c-peptide production may, since patients with higher residual c-peptide levels have less development of complications than those with lower levels. But are higher c-peptide levels a cause of milder complications or merely a correlate of them?
For a long time now there have been researchers, such as Professor Wahren, arguing that diabetics should be injected with c-peptide as a way to help prevent complications, but some experiments with c-peptide have suggested that it might also be harmful. This is why I wonder whether there is a direct correlation between higher c-peptide levels and better patient outcomes, or whether higher residual levels of c-peptide might be a side-effect of some other mechanism associated with a milder form of diabetes which diminishes the complications, such as the enhanced protection of DNA from hyperglycemic damage which has been found to protect patients from complications in the Joslin’s 50-year Medalist study.