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Item #2
New
Research Suggests Virus May Not Cause Diabetes
A
virus generally believed to be a cause of diabetes might actually help
protect people against the disorder.
That,
according to a results of a University of Nebraska Medical Center
study where researchers led by the husband-wife team of virologists
Drs. Steven Tracy and Nora Chapman injected various strains of the
virus - coxsackievirus - into mice that were genetically engineered to
contract diabetes.
The
researchers found two- to tenfold decreases in type 1 diabetes among
those mice over a 10-month period when compared with mice that had not
been injected with the virus.
The
results were published in a December 2002 issue of the Journal of
Virology.
"What
it could mean, many years down the road, is a potential vaccine
against type 1 diabetes," Tracy told the Omaha World-Herald.
The
concept is so contradictory to existing theories about the virus that
the researchers struggled to find a journal willing to publish their
results. But Tracy believes his results are more credible than
evidence suggesting the virus may help cause diabetes.
Using
a live virus to create a vaccine isn't new. That is how the polio
vaccine was created 4 decades ago. But it is new to suggest a virus
could protect people against a disease that is partly caused by
genetics.
Tracy
and Chapman now are studying which strains of the virus are most
effective and how they affect older mice. They also are addressing a
major complication that surfaced in their research; the virus
injections gave many of the mice pancreatitis, an inflammatory disease
of the pancreas.
The
research group hopes to discover a protein that could be given along
with the virus to prevent that inflammation, Tracy said.
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FACT
The
2003 update of the American Heart Association's Heart Disease and
Stroke Statistics examined the correlation between physical activity
and heart disease. People who are inactive are 1.5 to 2.4 times more
likely to develop heart disease.
Physical inactivity is more prevalent among women than men, and
among blacks and Hispanics more so than among whites.
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