Looking for answers =================== By using specially bred pigs, MU researchers strive to understand diabetes, a disease that affects one in every 17 Americans. ----------------------------------------------------------------- By Uwe Muench Special to the Missourian ------------------------- Michael Sturek suspected his son, Josh, had diabetes when he was three and just out of diapers. Josh urinated frequently, was always very thirsty, and was losing weight. "Classical symptoms of juvenile diabetes, ... I didn't have any people with diabetes in my family, so I figured it can't be right. But it was, and it's very easily diagnosed," Sturek said. Sturek should know. As an MU diabetes researcher and professor of physiology, demystifying the widespread disease has been the focus of his work. Josh was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, also called Type 1 diabetes. Another form of diabetes, Type 2, usually occurs in adults over 45 years of age who are overweight and physically inactive. Type 2 is more prevalent among African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians. About 16 million Americans, or one in every 17, have some form of diabetes. MU researchers are investigating the connections between some of these risk factors and diabetes, and Sturek specializes in the link between exercise, eating habits and controlling the disease. Brian Wamhoff, a doctoral student who has worked with Sturek, noted that for all adults it is "better to be up and walking than to be sitting around as a couch potato." But regarding the benefits of exercise and diabetes, "some of these things that we just assume, we are proving now," Wamhoff said. Wamhoff hopes to build on Sturek's ongoing research, but both note it is difficult for diabetes researchers to enter the field. The first thing a scientist needs is start-up funds for research labs, which creates a paradox for beginners regardless of their talent or motivation. "Four years ago, when we got interested in diabetes, and diabetes work, we couldn't go straight to NIH (the National Institutes of Health), because we really had to show NIH and the reviewers there that we had a track record," recalled Sturek. "We didn't have a track record." The funds raised by the American Diabetes Association are earmarked to help new researchers, Sturek explained. The money that the ADA raises in events like last month's Walk for Diabetes partially goes into starter grants. "The ADA grants are really geared towards getting people not in the area right now to start working on diabetes," Sturek said. "So, it's a starter grant, and they really did get us started." Initially, Sturek analyzed human arteries that were surgically removed. Diabetes increases coronary artery disease and the risk of heart attacks 400 percent. With later support from NIH, Sturek and his group started to study the connections between fat, diabetes and initial stages of heart disease. Today, they use diabetic pigs who are fed a high-fat diet to study how diet and exercise affect diabetes control. To test the impact of exercise, some of Sturek's pigs exercise on a treadmill. "Pigs, this is amazing, are more like humans than you think," Wamhoff explains. "When you call somebody a pig, it's true. It's a pretty good description of the human, because their heart is almost identical to the human heart." Three of the 16 students in Sturek's research group, MU students Andrea Czarnik, Kyle Bilhorn, and Christy Otis, weigh the specially bred vucatan pigs and use pulleys to move them to the scale hanging from the ceiling. They also measure the pigs' blood pressure and heart rate. They inject sugar, insulin, and other hormones and note how fast the pigs react to sugar in their blood, which simulates the reaction to eating. In a current study Dr. Sturek's students are testing five different groups of diabetic pigs to detect the effectiveness of a blood cholesterol drug. While results have yet to be released, Sturek reports he is encouraged about the ability to "discover new drugs and investigate drugs which already are used for other things." New drugs "might decrease these cardiovascular complications of diabetes without having to decrease blood glucose (sugar) and lipids (fat) a lot; because it's actually hard to do in some patients." Sturek's future project is to test whether high blood fat levels are a consequence of diabetes of both types, or if they singularly contribute to fostering Type 2 diabetes. In the interim, Sturek and his students share their special pigs with other researchers on campus. They hope that raised awareness through diabetes education will help to create new starter grants that will increase local collaboration as well as the number of other diabetes researchers. Josh will have good use for the results of his father's research. Currently, every diabetic with Type 1 or a severe case of Type 2 diabetes has to measure his or her blood sugar level several times a day. A small device called a glucosemeter does this job, but it is also easy to lose. The result of the sugar measurement tells diabetics how much insulin they should inject. If they inject too much insulin, their blood sugar level will be on the low side. Sturek explains that this state is called hypoglycemia and it leads to "disorientation, nausea, and so forth, and it can be life-threatening... That's very distressing." The vision of Sturek's group is to get rid of the need for insulin. To achieve this dream, they need "wonder drugs" that prevent the consequences of high blood sugar levels, such as heart disease, kidney failure, and blindness. "If it's [the drug in our study] or some other drug, that's what we want. That's what we think about every day," Sturek says. --------- Uwe Muench is a physicist who is working at MU on his doctoral degree.