Could 10% of diabetics one day get "cured" with a controlled parasitic infection?
Before you say "Where's the proof" this is a thought piece, put together from some reading I did today and some recent advances about MS.
In a nutshell, MS is now thought to be due to HLA mediated immune factors that were intended to help early humans fight off chronic hookworm infections. Take away the hookworms and some people's immune systems start going after nerve tissue instead.
What I am about to discuss does not apply to all diabetics, just those with a subtype that does not match either type 1 or type 2. Called Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adulthood, this types starts off like type 2 and then slowly progresses to type 1 insulin dependence over the course of years. It is associated with the GAD Ab.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_autoimmune_diabetes_of_adults
While researching central sleep apnea for a new book, I got off on a tangent about GAD antibiodes which are associated with a type of diabetes. GAD Ab is also associated with some types of autoimmune thryoiditis and neurologic diseases such as Stiff Man Syndrome (look it up) now called Stiff Person Syndrome because researchers probably got tired of all the snickering.The reason I am beginning to suspect that the GAD Ab might have something to do with our inborn infectious disease immunity--a study revealed that 10% of European Diabetics are GAD Ab pos type, 16% diabetics from Congo and China are this type---and no one from Papau New Guinea in this study had the GAD Ab pos type. Nobody. As in what is so different about Papau, New Guinea?
Now, it is possible that no one in Papau New Guinea has bred with anyone from off the island ever and that therefore, no one on the island has this gene. But that is not very likely. It is much more likely that Papau still has an infection that has become relatively less common in other parts of the world.
Recall that multiple sclerosis used to never ever occur in anyone who grew up in the US South. All that changed a couple of decades again which led me to wonder "What did people in the old South do that people in the new South do not do?" Answer, get exposed to hookworms by running around outside barefoot all summer. And sure enough researchers in England have found that if you give MS sufferers low, controlled hookworm infections their MS gets better. Those HLA coded inbred antibodies that were supposed to fight hookworms stop attacking normal body tissue and start attacking hook worms again.
So, I suggest that someone keep track of which infectious diseases are highly prevelant in Papau, which are going down due to public health intervention as well as measuring the percentage of diabetics who are GAD Ab pos in Papau. I suspect that we will find that some parasite such as schistosomias is protective against GAD Ab autoimmune disease. I suspect a parasite, because worms, being closer in biology to humans than say a bacterium, are more likely to have tissues that are similar to ours. Meaning that an antibody that evolved over time to fight a common parasite could also recognize a human body tissue if the parasite is not around.
Again, this will not help all diabetics. But if even 10% could avoid the progression to insulin dependence through a carefully controlled probiotic infection, it would cut public health spending a bunch.
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