Studies offer a wealth of information into various diseases, and Type 2 diabetes is certainly a disease which is being investigated and studied on a regular basis.
Type 2 diabetes is an inflammatory disease; inflammation is frequently a sign of infection. Investigators at Columbia University in New York, United States, conducted a study which was published in February 2012 in the journal Diabetes Care. The aim of the study was to determine whether certain viruses or bacteria could be associated with Type 2 diabetes.
This study included 782 people aged 60 and older without Type 2 diabetes at the beginning of the study. The blood of these 782 people was tested for several viruses and bacteria. After 10 years, the people who tested positive for a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori (H.pylori) had 2.7 times the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes as those without H. pylori.
From this it was concluded bacteria could play a role in the development of Type 2 diabetes, and that treating people with antibiotics could possibly help in the actual prevention of full-blown Type 2 diabetes.
H. pylori causes a common infection, being present in about half the world’s human population. It is one cause of:
- stomach inflammation or ulcers, which are treated with antibiotics.
- it has also been linked with certain kinds of stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, and a kind of cancer called Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Most people never show any signs or symptoms of H.pylori, but when they do, signs and symptoms include:
- aching or burning abdominal pain,
- nausea and/or vomiting,
- frequent burping,
- bloating,
- unintentional weight loss,
- difficulty swallowing,
- vomiting blood or “coffee grounds”,
- red blood with stools, or black, tarry stools, or
- feeling full after eating small amounts of food.
The infection is thought to be caused by person-to-person contagion, although the exact mode of transmission is not known. Washing hands before meals is recommended for preventing the spread of many contagious diseases.
There are four ways of testing for H. pylori:
- a finger prick can produce a drop of blood that can be quickly analyzed for the presence of antibodies to the bacteria, indicating an active or past infection.
- a breath test includes swallowing radioactive carbon and measuring radioactive carbon when you exhale.
- stool specimens can show proteins from H. pylori cells.
- an endoscope can be swallowed and entered into the stomach, where it can cut a tiny piece of tissue to be analyzed for H. pylori.
When infection is diagnosed, it can be treated with a combination of antibiotics to make sure all the bacteria is eradicated. Some combinations include amoxicillin (an antibiotic in the penicillin family), with clarithromycin, and metronidazole with tetracycline. Treatment generally eradicates 70 to 90 percent of H. pylori. Eradication of the infection could be a way of preventing the development of Type 2 diabetes.
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